Hope That Payday Was Worth It (Plus: Bonus Nerd Content!)

This is why you don't play games at 6 o'clock in the damn morning: Monmouth, playing on the road at St. Peter's, hit just 10 of 47 attempts from the floor on their way to a mind-bogglingly low 34 points in 65 possessions. So maybe agreeing to tip off a road game 45 minutes before sunrise wasn't the best idea in the world.

Speaking of St. Peter's, you may have noticed that they're the #1 team in the early season TAPE rankings. Are the Peacocks really that good? Probably not.

See, this year I've added an adjustment into TAPE that will account for the point in the season a given contest takes place. I know that some other systems weight for recent performance, and I wanted to find out whether that would make TAPE better. I couldn't find any evidence that it would, though. The season is too short and there are just too many random fluctuations around the mean in a given team's season to suss out any trends.

What I did find, though, was that there are certain trends that seem to apply across the board as the season progresses. The most notable of these is that the pace of games slows as the season progresses. Games in November are about three possessions faster than those played in March. This was sort of a big deal for TAPE, because it was built on the assumption that the overall environment of college basketball was fairly static throughout the season.

So I started drilling down into the component categories of the possession model to find out whether those varied over the course of the season as well, and, sure enough, lots of them did. Turnover rate, not surprisingly, is higher in November than in February; field goal shooting improves as the season goes along; offensive rebounding rate actually gets worse over the course of the season.

What's really interesting is that in some categories, there's much more change for either the home or away side. Home teams, for example, are very consistent throughout the season in terms of turnover rate and shooting percentages, while away teams get much better at both as the season progresses. (I'm pretty sure this is the source of my frustration in predicting games last season, when TAPE would be consistently high on its projection of total points scored and consistently low by a couple points on its projection of the visiting team's score.)

So that brings us back to St. Peter's. They had the good fortune of playing what might turn out to be their best game of the season on the road in their first game of the season. Once everyone gets a few games under their belts, that one game won't mean as much. Right now, though, it's all TAPE knows about the Peacocks.

Tournament Preview: Big East Quarterfinals

That Seton Hall-Syracuse game turned into an old-school Big East game: chippy, physical, and on the brink of getting out of the officials' control. As a kid growing up in ACC country I hated that stuff. It wasn't the way basketball was supposed to be played, and it certainly wasn't anything to be emulated. In short, the Big East was everything that was wrong with basketball. Now, though, I've come to have a certain appreciation for the Big East. I still wouldn't say that I like it, but I sure do appreciate that the league has an identity. That they've been able to maintain that identity through all manner of changes in membership and expansion to the brink of absurdity is pretty cool, too.

On to today's games. Louisville shouldn't have much of a problem with Providence in the opener. TAPE likes the Cardinals by 12¾ points (82.9 to 70.2 in a blistering 74.7 possessions).

TAPE sees Villanova as 3¼-point favorites over Marquette (76.6 to 73.4 in 70.2 possessions). The absence of Dominic James hasn't been accounted for, so that spread should probably be at least a couple points bigger.

Pittsburgh are only 1½ points better than West Virginia on the neutral floor according to TAPE (69.7 to 68.2 in 65.4 possessions). Pitt's only clear point of separation from the Mountaineers is on the offensive glass, so, just as in every Pittsburgh game, DeJuan Blair's presence on the court is the key to the whole thing.

UConn are 6 point favorites over the 'Cuse in the final game of the day (82.7 to 76.6 in 73.5 possessions). If the sloppiness of UVa-BC gets to be too much, click over to this game for what should be some really good basketball.

Tournament Preview: Big East Day Two

TAPE thinks DePaul has a better chance of beating Providence in today's first matchup than they did of knocking off Cincinnati yesterday. Still, the Friars are 9¾-point favorites (82.0 to 72.3 in 72.6 possessions).

In the second game, TAPE likes Marquette by 5¾ points over St. John's (75.0 to 69.2 in 69 possessions). Officially Marquette is the home team in this game, but for predictions purposes I'll be treating this and any other game St. John's might play in as a home game for the Johnnies.

TAPE absolutely loves West Virginia. They popped up as the nation's top-rated team as recently as a couple weeks ago. The Mountaineers are 7½-point favorites over the Irish (75.9 to 68.3 in 67.7 possessions).

Seton Hall and Syracuse close out the day, and TAPE likes the 'Cuse by 6¼ points (83.3 to 77 in 74.1 possessions). Fun fact: Seton Hall's Jeremy Hazell was one of only two players (Pitt's Sam Young being the other) named to one of the All-Big East teams who had a negative Wins Added rating according to PAPER.

Tournament Preview: Big East

The colossal clusterfuck that is the Big East Tournament is underway in Madison Square Garden, and there have already been upsets in the first two games. While both are surprises, neither is especially extraordinary. TAPE had Cincinnati pegged as an 11.5-point favorite over DePaul, but still gave the Blue Demons a 1 in 5 chance at the upset. St. John's, in what is essentially a home game, had a better than 1 in 4 chance of knocking off the Hoyas. In any case, this should end any NCAA talk for either Cincinnati or Georgetown. In the evening session, TAPE likes Notre Dame by 7 over Rutgers (73.8 to 66.6) and Seton Hall by 4 over South Florida (67.5 to 63.1) in the nightcap.

The pre-tournament odds looked like this (the number in each column represents the team's odds of playing in that round; the number in the far-right colum indicates the team's chances of winning the conference championship):

Based on the following table of matchups: