Against Ranked Teams Week 2 (basketball)

[SWC75]

It occurred to me that with a new basketball season beginning I could do an “Against Ranked Teams” post for this sport, too. The margins of victory are similar to football. The formula is to first give each team that plays a ranked team from 1-25 points based on the ranking (I’ll use the writer’s poll) of their opponent. This chart shows you how many points they’d get for playing each team ranked at a certain level , (the ranking is first, the points, second):

1-25, 2-24, 3-23, 4-22, 5-21, 6-20, 7-19, 8-18, 9-17, 10-16, 11-15, 12-14, 13-13, 14-12, 15-11, 16-10, 17-9, 18-8, 19-7, 20-6, 21-5, 22-4, 23-3, 24-2, 25-1

I’ll call those “schedule points”. Then you look at the point differential in the game and apply it to the schedule points. If a team loses to the #1 ranked team by 10 points. They’d wind up with 15 points: 25 schedule points minus the ten points they lost by. If a team beats the #10 team by 5 points, they’d get 21 points: 16 schedule points plus the 5 points they won by. If a team lost to the #20 team by 6 points, they’d get nothing. The margin of defeat would cancel out their schedule points. If a team lost to the #25 team by 3 points, they get a zero. You can’t have negative points. You just failed in an attempt to get positive points.

I’ll figure the points based on games over the past week every Sunday and post them, along with cumulative season standings, just as I have done for football. As I said on that post, this is less a way of ranking than it is simply something you might want to look at in ranking them – or selecting them for a tournament. I recognize that rankings will change over the course of the season. I’m making the assumption that teams are worthy of the ranking they have at the time another team plays them. That may not always be true but a subsequent ranking may just reflect how good or bad a team has become since the game in question: they may have been as good as their ranking at the time.

WEEK TWO (November 13-19, 2016)

Baylor beat #4 Oregon 66-49 = 39 points
Kentucky beat #13 Michigan State 69-48 = 34 points
Creighton beat #9 Wisconsin 79-67 = 29 points
Kansas beat #1 Duke 79-77 = 27 points
Purdue lost to #3 Villanova 76-79 = 20 points
Duke lost to #7 Kansas 77-79 = 17 points
Penn State lost to #1 Duke 68-78 = 15 points
Missouri lost to #11 Xavier 82-83 = 14 points
Western Michigan lost to #3 Villanova 65-76 = 12 points
Clemson lost to #11 Xavier 77-83= 9 points
Rhode Island beat #24 Cincinnati 76-71 = 7 points
Hawaii lost to #5 North Carolina 68-83 = 6 points
Dayton lost to #17 St. Mary’s 67-71 = 5 points
CSU Bakersfield lost to #10 Arizona 66-78 = 4 points
Wake Forest lost to #3 Villanova 77-96 = 4 points
Georgia State lost to #15 Purdue 56-64 = 3 points
Michigan State lost to #2 Kentucky 48-69 = 3 points

Those early season confrontations between top teams allow them to pile up the points, even if they don’t win them. But the lesser known teams get a seat at the table, too. We’ll hear less from them once the cofnerence seasons begin.


Cumulative Totals

Baylor 39 points
Kansas 38 points
Kentucky 34 points
Creighton 29 points
Indiana 27 points
Purdue 20 points
Duke 17 points
Wagner 17 points
Arizona 16 points
Lehigh 16 points
Penn State 15 points
Michigan State 14 points
Missouri 14 points
Western Michigan 12 points
Clemson 9 points
Army 7 points
Rhode Island 7 points
Hawaii 6 points
Dayton 5 points
CSU Bakersfield 4 points
Wake Forest 4 points
Georgia State 3 points
Michigan State 3 points
Stephen F. Austin 1 point

 

[Orange2389]

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[SWC75]

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