The makings of the Bzdelik line
At the end of last season, I talked about the number of historically bad basketball teams this year and how three such teams are on pace to be the worst BCS conference team of the last decade. Wake Forest made the least of their opportunities, and managed to finish the season far worse than any other major conference team in recent history. In Part II, I begin to investigate why these teams are so bad. What are the common traits shared by bad basketball teams, and what sets the truly awful apart?
During the most recently completed season, there were 73 teams within these conferences, so even with a number of good mid-major programs in a given year, most of these schools, with additional resources, tv exposure, and name recognition end up among the top 100 teams in the country each year. With this in mind, I generally define a bad BCS conference basketball team as one ranked outside the top 100 teams in the country, as defined by Ken Pomeroy’s efficiency ratings. From 2003 to 2011, an average 12 teams from the BCS conferences have finished outside the top 100 each season. A team at the bottom of the standings in any but the top conferences is generally among this group. In addition, 33 teams (3.7 per season) have taken that a step further, finishing outside the top 150 in the country. This number has gone up to 5 per season over the last 3 years, partially due to expansion increasing the number of teams within such conferences.
Being among the worst BCS conference teams in a given year takes a number of different events happening concurrently. A few of these programs never seem to elude this level of play, while others fall off the map for just a year or two before reverting to their prior status.
Let’s take a look at some programs that consistently set the bar low:
-Depaul has been among the worst in each of the 2009 through 2011 seasons, finishing outside the top 150 in each year. Meanwhile, fellow Big East squads USF, which has finished outside the top 100 5 of the last 6 years, and Rutgers looks poised to end a four year run outside the top 100, with final rankings between 141 and 166 over the last 4 years have also been consistently poor.
- Colorado suffered three consecutive sub-100 seasons from 2007-2009.
- Penn St had three consecutive below 150 from 2003-2005.
- Baylor suffered a period of futility from 2004-2006, where they finished well outside of the top 100 each year after that program fell apart following the murder of one player by another and subsequent cover up by then coach Dave Bliss.
- And the torch bearer for poor major conference programs is Oregon State, which has not had a winning conference record (with only 1 winning season) since 1989-1990. They have finished outside of the top 100 each year from 2003-2011, finishing between 104 and 157 each year other than 2009, when they finished an abysmal 210th in the country. As noted in my previous post, that season had been the worst recorded season over the period measured, until Wake Forest decided to leave its mark on the record books last season.
As bad as this group of teams was for long stretches, only Depaul’s 2009 and 2011 seasons, Penn St from 2003-2005, Baylor’s probation-ridden teams in 2004 and 2005 and Oregon State’s 2008 season were among the bottom half of all teams in the country in the years noted. Even for bad programs, something additional has to happen for a team in a BCS conference to be among the bottom half of Division 1. Setting aside Baylor, whose downfall is documented, and Penn St, who did share the characteristics I will talk about later but occurred during the beginning of this period, I will shift my attention to the other outliers and their counterparts who joined them for one (or sometimes two) especially bad years. I will focus on the period from 2007-2011, where a fuller range of statistics is readily available than for the first four years of the sample.
From 2007-2011, a total of 11 BCS Conference teams finished in the bottom half of Division 1. I searched for statistical correlations among these teams to see if all of these teams shared any traits in common. Obviously none of these teams displayed good offensive or defensive efficiency numbers, but that’s the overall outcome. The trick is to figure out why the outcome was so poor over the course of a season. However, looking at a number of statistical areas through efficiency or counting stat measures, there was no constant as far as these teams all being near the bottom of Division 1 in these statistical areas. Some were very good shooting teams, while others were extremely poor. Some blocked a lot of shots while others blocked almost none. Some could get stops initially but couldn’t rebound the ball, while others offered no resistance to an opponent’s first look. In other words, based on an analysis of stats measured on the court, some commonalities were noted, but no single predictive factor stood out. With that in mind, I looked at other factors that could affect a team’s performance that aren’t picked up in a standard box score.
Coaching, home court advantage (or lack thereof) and experience were the next factors I looked at. The effect of coaching is almost impossible to quantify because it cannot be entirely separated from the talent on the court. The same can be said even if there is turnover in the coaching ranks, although that at least provides one extra data point to consider (and will be considered below). Home court advantage can be quantified by the difference between a team’s home and road performance, although the sample size provided by one team over the course of one season may not be significantly significant. And these poor teams we are talking about were bad regardless of location, so it would only be significant to the extent it failed to provide the home boost that other teams received. However, experience, while not a valid predictor of the performance of all teams, proved to be a far more significant predictor of just how far major conference teams can fall than I could have imagined.
The rankings (of approximately 345 teams per season) of the 11 BCS conference teams to finish in the bottom half of D1 over the last 5 seasons are as follows in the given season (with experience in parenthesis):
2008: Oregon St – 212 (311)
2009: Indiana – 210 (343, last), Georgia – 200 (258), Depaul – 198 (303)
2010 Indiana – 183 (339), LSU – 182 (296), Iowa – 173 (340)
2011: Wake Forest – 251 (327), LSU – 227 (328), Auburn – 214 (324), Depaul – 202 (278)
No one on that list was better than 258th in experience and 8 of 11 teams had experience worse than 300th in the country. After seeing those results, I expanded my search for the other 10 teams to finish outside the top 150 over that same stretch. Here is that list:
2007: Colorado – 168 (314), Rutgers – 166 (202), Oregon St. – 151 (248);
2008: Rutgers – 164 (272), Northwestern – 158 (303)
2009: Colorado – 168 (323), Oregon – 156 (330),
2010: Depaul – 172 (212), Rutgers – 156 (242)
2011: Oregon St – 160 (268)
Again, every team on this list was outside the top 200 in experience, with 4 of the 10 outside the top 300. In addition, of those teams with experience within the top 250, all of them appear on the above lists at least 3 times, illuminating prolonged stretches of futility rather than a sharp drop-off. These programs never seem to have experienced teams, as a revolving door of coaches and transfers keeps these teams in limbo.
The other programs have had their own issues that led to shorter falls, seemingly one-offs in those programs histories. Indiana went through the short-lived Kelvin Sampson experience, which ended in probation, mass transfers, and the least experienced team in the history of the NCAA in new coach Tom Crean’s first year, a year in which multiple walk-ons regularly graced the floor together. This was a two year fall, as Indiana played a host of recruited freshmen the following year and finished 339th in experience. LSU has experienced a 2 year downturn in the 2nd and 3rd years of Trent Johnson’s era as coach, as Johnson has cleaned house since taking over. Auburn and Wake Forest had terrible first seasons under new head coaches in 2011, while Georgia and Iowa fired their head coaches after their low points and started over.
With all this data together, it should be much easier to spot teams with the potential to fall this far this fast by the makeup of their roster as they head into a new season. While inexperience doesn’t guarantee a bad season, as teams such as Kentucky and Uconn showed last year, it is at the very least a required and common element for team’s that suffer the worst fulility.
