Dance of the Digital Decade 2002-2011

WAIT…HOLD ON …IT APPEARS THE COMMITTEE IS ADDING ‘CUSE 02/03 to the digital dance!

It appears that National Champions must receive an automatic bid to the decade dance. Its pretty clear that if Melo and company played the way they did in the first half of the title game against runner-up Kansas, they would spank most every top team on this list outta of the decade dance! Unlike some Selection Sunday Shows of the not-to-distant past, it looks like ‘The Orange‘ will not get hosed out of this tourney.

Sign up for Marchpool.com‘s Twitter and Facebook sites to receive information about the upcoming Decade Simulation tourney. And yes, we will include important ‘end of the year‘ momentum stats data along with the 14 point MPI-10 metric as part of the tourney algorithm. Maybe we‘ll end up with that elusive Duke-Carolina Final game, who knows?

NEXT MARCHPOOL DIGITAL DECADE DANCE will include the 2012 team class (UK) and the 2013 class (Louisville), available in March 2015. We hope you will PLAY MARCHPOOL 2014 and keep in touch throughout the tourney via our Monday blogs – this March and into the future as well. Good luck to your team in this March - Cheers!

Disclosure: This ranking system is/was strictly about ‘body of work‘ across an entire season. It does not claim to represent ‘the best overall team‘. A well thought out decade tournament simulation just might be capable of settling that argument – stay tuned!

Marchpool announces:
“Dance of the Digital Decade 2002-2011”

By Bob Barton, March 13, 2014

It‘s been 13 years since the NCAA first began publicizing men‘s college basketball statistics on the internet. We at Marchpool have been crunching the data for the 340+ Division 1 teams over the first 10 years of data (2002 thru 2011). We compared the 14 key basketball team metrics that are reported/stored for each D1 game on the NCAA‘s website. We offer up this compilation of the 1st decade of CBB stats for you to feast on!

NUMBERS TELL A STORY

Sometimes data can be incomplete in nature, sometimes it can mislead analysts to false conclusions. With courage in our instincts and mouse in hand, we delved deeply into these numbers. We recombined NCAA stats into larger categories like dominance/resilience. Like all good CBB junkies, we searched for hidden patterns that might help us demystify dance results from previous 64+ team tournaments.

The NCAA tourney, the entropy filled March classic with its last shot daggers, bad calls, comebacks, injuries, biases and (gasp!) conspiracy theories– is the gold standard for deciding which is the best CBB team for any given season. Our analysis set out to answer another far less dramatic question; ‘What CBB team most exemplified basketball excellence on a consistent basis across an ENTIRE season?‘ In other words, if a round ball novice – say, an alien - wanted to observe superior CBB play, which men‘s college team(s) would have been best to watch perform– ideally from a midcourt seat?

The Marchpool Index (MPI-10) ‘invitation‘ list for 2002-2011 digital dance

With our MPI-10 metric sorting out 3440+ bodies of work, we‘re inviting 68 teams to our stats dance. We‘ve even listed a ‘first out‘ 69th team just for cruel fun! Note: Only nine of ten NCAA champions made the grade. Hey, what‘s a Selection show without one outrageous omission?!? We suspect a #16 would knock out a #1 seed during this digital dance, or a future one. Talk about parity! We‘re looking forward to simulating this tourney next fall.

LASTLY - If you don‘t like our MPI-10 invitation list for the first digital decade, don‘t feel alone! We encourage you to add facts/opinions on each of the 69 teams under its associated commentary section. Last by not least, a special thanks goes out to Jim Sukup of RPIratings.com for his contributions. As far as the rest of the CBB stats, the 3440+ teams own them; every 3 pointer, every turnover. We at Marchpool are simply reporting THEIR results. We invite you to PLAY MARCHPOOL.COM with us (sign-up now!), and encourage you to follow us through our blog/twitter.

LET THE DANCE BEGIN :-)

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