Monday, March 17, 2014

March Madness 2014: How The Top Contenders Stack Up to Past Final Four Teams

My favorite time of the year is here- March Madness. Yes, my favorite team got screwed stuck in the toughest bracket and I'm relatively low on optimism this year, but everyone is saying that the tournament will be wide open and as always I'll be watching every single game this weekend.
When looking at the brackets, I started to wonder how this year's teams compare to recent Final Four teams.  Using the wealth of data at Ken Pomeroy's site, I pulled the KenPom 2014 Top 25 and looked at the Final Four teams from 2003-2013 to see if there are any similarities. Using the Adjusted Offensive and Defensive Efficiencies, I put all teams on a scatter plot and created quadrants based on


the averages for the past Final Four teams. You can see the picture above or click here for an interactive version in Tableau. A few things stick out:
  • The "Balanced" zone features teams with both an efficient offense (high points per possession) and an efficient defense (low points allowed per possession). 6 of the past 11 NCAA champs were in that zone- as of 3/15/14, only Louisville (a #4 seed in that loaded Midwest region) and Florida (the #1 overall seed) meet this criteria.
  • One other note on the balanced zone: Checking on all tournament teams from 2003-2013, only 13 teams finished in this zone. Only 2 did not reach the Final Four- St. Joseph's in 2004 (lost in Elite 8) and Kansas in 2010 (lost in 2nd round).
  • Michigan, Duke, and Creighton would need unprecedented runs to reach the Final Four- no team with as bad a defense has reached the final weekend of the tournament since 2003. In fact, when I looked at all tournament teams in the period, the most similar teams to those 3 were 2012 Missouri and the 2005 Wake Forest team led by Chris Paul. Both those teams were 2 seeds that lost in the first weekend.
  • It seems that great offense trumps great defense, as we have yet to see a below average offensive team with a very good defense win. Though 2003 Syracuse and 2011 UConn won despite being below average in both categories. Arizona and Virginia will try to change that bit of history.
  • I also looked at the differential (Offensive Efficiency minus Defensive Efficiency) and the one thing that stood out this year is there is no outlier. In previous seasons there were at least one or two teams that were well ahead of the rest (ie Louisville last season, Kentucky in 2012) but this year none. Even the crazy 2011 tournament that featured an 8 seed, an 11 seed, a 3 seed, and a 4 seed in the Final Four had Ohio State as a big pre-tournament favorite. 
  • The Ken Pom site only has final (post-tournament) ratings for previous seasons, so it is possible that a team could change their ratings during the tournament.
So check out the full viz and start filling out those brackets.