While tooling around the VSiN website last week and reading some of my colleagues’ pieces, I came across an article from Aaron Moore entitled In it, he stated that he believes the CBB futures board hasn’t been picked over by the betting public yet because so many are still focused on the Super Bowl market rather than March Madness. He used this as a justification for sharing his thoughts on which teams have the best value now in looking ahead to who could cut down the nets at Houston in early April.
While I won’t go through all his insights, particularly those about the potential home team for Final Four weekend, I will take the opportunity to piggyback on his piece by sharing the method I use to find teams that have championship-level resumes at this point in the season, and I will be focused a lot on those Houston Cougars, my current top power rated team.
Most of you that read my work know that I like to employ a methodology called Shared Statistical Traits to compare current teams to past teams achieving a certain goal or level of success. While the teams and players might change from year-to-year, the overall resume of what it takes to be a champion does not.
For this exercise, I’ll take a current snapshot of the key stats, rosters, and strength ratings of the country’s top teams and share which ones have the most traits befitting of a title contender. I do this annually at tournament time, and it has become quite popular among readers. Essentially, I pick out 12 different key statistical categories and four of my own personal Strength Indicators, plus a Combined Average Ranking.
After determining the national season ranks for all the Division 1 teams, I compared them to the Championship teams from the nine tournaments for special analysis. For each stat category, I look for minimum performance, typical national ranking, and the percentile of teams that qualify within certain ranges. As a final exclamation point on the analysis, I take a Combined National Ranking of the 16 sortable categories to separate the more complete teams from the rest.
In the past, when summarizing the findings, I have determined that the relationship between my Effective Strength Indicator was the most significant of all the categories analyzed. The average of the last 36 Final Four teams ranked about 12th in the country in that rating. Among the harder core statistical categories, Effective Defensive Points per Possession was most important. Interestingly, the least important factor was Defensive Turnovers per Possession, or the ability to force turnovers on defense.
Shared Traits of Tournament Champions
Recent years of tournament action have shown that there is a big difference between reaching the Final Four and winning the title. Typically, only the truly elite teams accomplish the latter. Here’s a look at the minimum requirements for winning a tournament championship over the last decade. Just to jog your memory, these are the nine champions during that time span:
2013 LOUISVILLE (#1)
2014 CONNECTICUT (#7)
2015 DUKE (#1)
2016 VILLANOVA (#2)
2017 N CAROLINA (#1)
2018 VILLANOVA (#1)
2019 VIRGINIA (#1)
2021 BAYLOR (#1)
2022 KANSAS (#1)
Looking for clear separations in the teams’ stats/ranks, of the last nine NCAA Champions:
– Eight of them went into the tournament with a Steve Makinen Power Rating of 89 or higher.
– Eight of them finished the regular season with a Schedule Strength ranked in the top 45 nationally.
– Seven of them ranked in the Top 55 in Offensive Points per Game and scored at least 72 PPG.