Bruno
PhD Student
Posts: 1419
Loc: Brooklyn, NY
Reg: 11-21-04
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01-09-22 01:54 PM - Post#332953
The start of the Ivy season generally gets me less excited than it should. Which makes no sense given that the non-conference performance has nothing to do with Brown making either the Ivy or NCAA tournaments. But I tend to be more into Brown playing non-conference games than I do against the Ivies. I also tend to feel better about the team before the first Ivy game than I do after the final one. Maybe that’s just a function of having to play Yale 2x over a two week period in which we typically emerge 0-2. But it made me curious about why I’ve been such a seemingly backwards fan.
And then I thought - we’ll maybe it’s not me. Maybe it’s them.
So I looked at the last eight years of Brown’s Kenpom.com rankings for Brown before their first Ivy game vs. their last. And the results are sort of interesting, if not overwhelming.
Rank Pre-Ivy -> Post-Ivy
2020: 210 -> 224
2019: 131 -> 148
2018: 237 -> 267
2017: 270 -> 277
2016: 246 -> 265
2015: 255 -> 268
2014: 197 -> 154
2013: 269 -> 232
So in what happened to be this coaching staff’s first two seasons, they clearly outperformed in the Ivy and ‘got better’. But in the last six, their ranking has only dropped after the Ivy season, in some cases materially.
Obviously there’s noise in these data, but I wonder if this trend is seen in other Ivies. (I’m not sure how the kp.com algorithms work, but I would think that since the non conference games end for virtually all Ivies once the Ivy season starts that four teams would be better positioned and four would be worse by the end of the Ivy, on average.)
But it does make me wonder, since this six year streak, if this is enough data to suggest that other teams know a little more about Brown over the last six seasons than Brown does about them, all else being equal.
Reax?
| LET'S go BRU-no (duh. nuh. nuh-nuh-nuh) |
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Ever True
Junior
Posts: 255
Age: 28
Reg: 02-02-15
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01-10-22 02:40 PM - Post#333004
In response to Bruno
Thanks for the detailed post, Bruno!
I took a look at the Kenpom rankings for Penn, as a team that's been around us in the standings - with the exception of 2018. Here's what I got:
Rank Pre-Ivy -> Post-Ivy
2020: 112 -> 142
2019: 130 -> 120
2018: 144 -> 133
2017: 146 -> 167
2016: 245 -> 264
2015: 259 -> 276
2014: 255 -> 277
2013: 264 -> 238
In 2018, Penn were the champions and 2019 was probably the best the league has been, at least in recent past, with everyone in the top four finishing in the Kenpom top 150. In 2013, there were two teams in the top 100 - Harvard and Princeton - and Penn had a home win against the Crimson.
I also took a look at 4th place teams in all of the years you listed to see what that would look like - I figured fourth, as a middle of the pack team, often only separated by a few games from either the top or bottom two, would be a good place to look as well.
Rank Pre-Ivy -> Post-Ivy
2020: Penn 112 -> 142
2019: Penn 130 -> 120
2018: Cornell 245 -> 261
2017: Penn 146 -> 167
2016: Harvard 114 -> 188
2015: Dartmouth 163 -> 161
2014: Columbia 89 -> 119
2013: Brown 269 -> 236
So again, besides 2019, which was a good year for the league, 2013, and 2015, which was another year with two top 100 teams (Dartmouth beat Harvard on the road), all 4th place teams dropped in Kenpom over the course of conference play.
I guess what this shows is that if you don't beat one of the league's best, in a good year, that's probably not going to be enough to overcome a home loss to a bottom-tier team in any given year, as far as Kenpom is concerned. Which is to say, this probably shows that the Bears have been an up-and-down team - we’ve picked up good wins against Harvard and Princeton in years past, but haven’t been able to keep it up against teams like Columbia and Cornell, with no disrespect intended to either of those teams. This past weekend is a perfect indicator in some ways - we put in our best offensive performance of the season against Harvard, followed by our worst offensive performance of the season against Dartmouth. Granted, Dartmouth is a good defensive team, there’s a lot of parity in the league this year, etc. But still, you look at a team like Princeton on this past weekend - they didn’t play their best basketball, but they found a way to win two games.
We’ve been frustrating in the sense that we often win games that we’re not expected to win, and then come up short in games that we are either expected to win or need to win. I think Mike has done an excellent job at raising the level of this program and I’m hoping this is the year he can make the breakthrough into that higher division. If we don’t, I’m not quite sure where we go from here, as I think it will be another year or two before we have a team capable of finishing in the top four. Certainly too early to be looking to the seasons to come, but just my two cents.
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Bruno
PhD Student
Posts: 1419
Loc: Brooklyn, NY
Reg: 11-21-04
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01-10-22 09:05 PM - Post#333056
In response to Ever True
Thanks for this good analysis. You answered my question about at least one other Ivy and the trend.
Agree about the program being on different footing. We'd been in the top 200 twice in the 16 seasons prior to MM. In the 9 seasons since we've made it three times, and twice in the last three seasons. And while T and Jaylan are huge pieces, I think we've got several all-Ivy players left after they're gone.
It does feel like in the past few season we've had weekends with a great win followed by a clunker. The hardest game to win is the back half of the back-to-back on the road; you beat a Harvard, you lose to a Dartmouth. It's hard to road sweep in this league but as you point out, the playoff teams do it at least once if not twice.
| LET'S go BRU-no (duh. nuh. nuh-nuh-nuh) |
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