Early bracketology contains mistakes, amusement

Any time of year, we know we can count on Joe Lunardi for some amusement. His job is easy, in the sense that he guesses who will be in the NCAA tournament year round. It’s just not easy to be accurate, and I think Joe is especially bad at it.

A day after Tennessee got a commit from Emmanuel Negedu to play in Knoxville, Joe has put up a revised bracketology. Go check it out so you can share my amusement. How is it funny? Shall I enumerate the ways?

1. Tennessee is a 7 seed.
2. Memphis is a 1 seed.
3. Kentucky is a 9 seed.
4. Teams seeded above UT: Arizona, Davidson, Miami, Baylor, Oklahoma, Purdue, Arizona State, and Florida.
5. Teams on the same seed line as UT: UAB, Wake Forest, and a Jamont Gordon-less Mississippi State.

I could keep going and going. Let me justify my belly laughing with some brief explanation. Last year, Memphis was a 1 and Tennessee was a 2. Memphis loses Chris Douglas-Roberts, Derrick Rose, Joey Dorsey, and Andre Allen. That’s 43 points, 20 rebounds, and 9 assists. Tennessee lost Chris Lofton, JaJuan Smith, Jordan Howell, Duke Crews, and Ramar Smith. That’s 47 points, 15 rebounds, and 10 assists. Those numbers are close, maybe a smidge in Memphis’s favor. Incoming classes are pretty even– both teams got a stud guard (Tyreke Evans and Scotty Hopson), and both got three 4 star forwards. In addition, UT signed JUCO AA PG Bobby Maze and Daniel West. This is a push. So, from this info, you tell me how Memphis is a 1 seed again while Tennessee drops to a 7.

Kentucky as a 9 is pretty close to Tennessee as a 7. Well . . . Kentucky was an 11 last year and lost literally half their points in the form of Senior guards Ramel Bradley and Joe Crawford. Since Big Blue is also losing Derrick Jasper and Alex Legion to transfer, they lose more than half their points and assists. Their incoming class is ranked lower than UT’s by every meaningful service, yet Lunardi expects them to improve their seed by 2 while UT drops 5 spots? Laughable.

Arizona is a 2 in Lunardi’s bracket, which makes me literally laugh out loud. They get Chase Budinger back but they lose Jerryd Bayless and they just made the tourney last year by the skin of their teeth. You’re telling me big time recruit Brandon Jennings will replace Bayless and further improve the team 8 seed lines? Come on, Joe.

As for the rest of the teams I listed ranked ahead or even with us, some of them will be good teams, like Florida, Mississippi State, and Purdue. I still find it amusing that Joe has them ahead of UT, as I think the Vols are clearly better on paper. You never know what will happen when the season begins, but boy . . . Lunardi has been hitting the good stuff, and hitting it early in the morning to think this bracket is going to materialize.

For what it’s worth, I see UT as anywhere between a 2 and a 5, depending largely on the impact of the new guys.

Lunardi confirms he is full of crap

Hey, we all love Joe Lunardi, right? He’s among my favorite ESPN “experts” because he’s such a master at talking out of his ass. I would love to have the man’s job, but it’s a totally unnecessary one. We crave information and for our teams to be mentioned so badly that we pay Joe Lunardi to give his opinion. And good for Joe– it’s good work if you can get it.

But Joe does some crazy things sometimes. Earlier this year I took exception because he cracked on our defense and used bad statistics to do it. Throughout his entire bracketology prediction process he said and did a lot of stupid things. He did another one today on ESPN.com.

Joe listed all teams, 65-to-1, in order of when they will get knocked out of the tourney. He says this about Tennessee:

18. TENNESSEE Call me crazy, but not all No. 1 and No. 2 seeds are surviving into the second weekend. Tennessee appears vulnerable to me, and the run-and-gun South Alabama Jaguars have the firepower and site (Birmingham) to pull a huge upset. The Jags play on, 75-70.

Picking USA in a big second round upset over UT is not “crazy.” I think it’s very unlikely, but not crazy. It could happen. What is crazy is his reasoning. He gives two reasons why he thinks this will happen. Here’s the first:

the run-and-gun South Alabama Jaguars have the firepower . . .

Run-and-gun? Joe, are you serious? Readers, you know how easy this is to fact check. We can all run over to KenPom’s site and see what kind of pace USA likes to play at, and how good their offensive “firepower” is. What says KenPom? The Jaguars play at an average pace of 66.5 possessions per game, good for 177th in the country, and only played 2 games all season above UT’s average pace. Run-and-gun? Come on, Joe. Now you’re just making things up.

As far as “firepower” is concerned, he’s at least right that USA’s offense (111.1 efficiency) is better than its defense (97.6 efficiency), but neither rank in the top 50 nationally. USA’s offense ranks 37th among the 65 NCAA tourney teams in offense. That’s not terrible– not in the least. But the way Lunardi talks you’d think they were going to drop 90 every game.

Lunardi also alluded to the game’s location as a factor in the game. True, Birmingham is in Alabama. True, USA is in Alabama. So, if you’re Lunardi and don’t like to do any real research, perhaps you’d think this is advantage Jaguars. Right?

Wrong. What Lunardi doesn’t know is that Mobile, where South Alabama is located, is 258 miles from Birmingham. So how far is Knoxville, TN from Birmingham?

256 miles.

Nashville, which is home to a lot of UT alumni, is just 193 miles from the ‘ham. The Jaguars’ students and alumni have to travel just as far as the UT students and alumni, and there are a lot fewer of them around. UT awards almost twice as many degrees annually as USA does, and that’s just considering the Knoxville campus.

So I hardly think USA is going to have any homecourt boost if both teams advance to play each other Sunday. Sorry to disappoint you, Joe.

None of this is intended as a slight to the Jaguars– USA is a fine school and the basketball team has played some great games this year. I wouldn’t presume a UT victory in this game. It would be a tough contest, as most NCAA matchups are. But Joe, if you’re going to pick some fancy upsets like this . . . man, could you do just a little fact-checking? It took me 5 minutes to find the info that makes you look like a fool. Next time try spending those 5 minutes yourself and save yourself a little embarrassment.

Joe Lunardi is not good with numbers

Is this news to anyone? Apparently in an ESPN insider article he seeded Tennessee 11th overall (which is fair), but had this to say about the Vol defense:

11. TENNESSEE. The SEC is just so-so this year, which means the Vols could post the kind of record that earns an even better seed than this. Then I look at their defensive quotient from last season and shudder. According to my metrics, Tennessee was 223rd in the country at that end of the floor.

Now, I laughed at a couple of things here. First, that the SEC is so-so. Last I recall, the SEC was considered so-so for the last two years. All that the SEC produced was 5 Sweet Sixteen teams and two national titles.

But forget that. What’s really making me laugh is his “metric” that ranked Tennessee 223rd last year in defense. First, let me explain something. When a talking head uses the words “metric” and “quotient” and doesn’t actually tell you what he’s referring to, he’s probably full of crap and doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

I’d like to know what “metric” he uses and why he thinks it’s good. Points per game, perhaps. Opponent’s FG %, perhaps. Maybe some combination of these traditional stats. But to serious basketball analysts, there is one bottom line stat that assesses how well a team plays defense: adjusted defensive efficiency. Let me sum up.

Teams play at differing tempos, resulting in a vast difference in the number of possessions (scoring opportunities) for both them and for their opponents. A team that plays at a fast tempo, like Tennessee, is likely to score more and give up more points, no matter how well they actually play on each end. For example, VMI led the nation in scoring last year (PPG), and was last in the nation in scoring defense. That doesn’t REALLY tell you how good they were on either end. Only that they played very, very fast, giving both themselves and their opponents more chances to score. To really compare how good teams are at either end, you need to look at points per possession, not points per game. Defensive efficiency is just points per possession allowed times 100.

The adjusted part comes in because teams play schedules of varying difficulty. If you play all of your games against RPI 300+ teams, you should be much more efficient on offense and defense than a team that played all their games against RPI <100 teams. So to get a fair, comparable measure, a team’s efficiency is adjusted by how good their competition was. In the case of defensive efficiency, it’s adjusted by how good your opponents were on offense. This way, we get a single stat that measures how effective each team was on defense, adjusted to an average schedule.

How was Tennessee’s defense then? According to Ken Pomeroy’s calculations, the Vols’ adjusted defensive efficiency was 54th in the nation. That’s not world-beating, but it’s damn sure a lot better than 223rd, and with a very efficient offense (8th) it was good enough to get us to within a Greg Oden of the Elite 8.

Lunardi tries hard, but he is a talking head. He doesn’t know better. In fact, few of the talking heads know much about basketball statistics, and we shouldn’t expect them to. They’re not numbers dorks like some of us are. So Joe, you keep on writing about the NCAA tournament and the teams you think we’ll be there, and we’ll keep on reading, hoping to hear nuggets about our favorite teams . . . but leave the “metrics” and “quotients” to people who know what they mean.