Marching Toward Madness

The Change In 2016, College Basketball changed dramatically, and that change impacted significantly the quality of play on the court and the ability for gamblers to predict that activity.   5 Seconds.    The move of the shot clock from 35 to 30 seconds is significant.   And gamblers often talk about March Madness trends from earlier this decade without understanding that much of that is invalid data, due to 5 seconds.   The shot clock drives a concept called Average Possession Length.  APL drives number of possessions/game.   One of the best ways to understand and predict future results of points scored by each team is to predict possession counts and then apply possession based stats against those predicted possessions in any given game.    Ken Pom has great data here I'll use to show the impacts of 5 seconds.   If we focus on the Tempo (Possessions/Game Total) you can see it increas...

The Seeds There is nothing more exciting than Selection Sunday.   For me that starts the best week of the year.   (And an aside, my second favorite week of the year is the week before when I'm watching the conference tournaments).    Selection Sunday is the result of an important process that is debated but in reality is very regimented and for gamblers important to understand.   This is the NCAA D1 Men's Basketball Tournament Committee Principles and Procedures.   So many times, I hear/read posts from people who don't understand the realities of how it works.   I'm not going to explain it all here; use this reference:    Long Form -- NCAA  There are 3 steps, they are unique and although at times overlapping done mutually exclusive to each other.    What I think most people will find interesting is that although there is much discussion, the process of selecting and seeding teams...