It’s Your Time College Basketball
I can hear the March Madness jingle already
I love college basketball.
Unfortunately my ASU Sun Devils are nowhere close to even being a bubble team and don’t deserve any type of deeper look. Wanting to get my college basketball fix in despite not having a relevant college basketball team has put my mind on my future March Madness bracket much earlier than usual this year. Which brings us to my favorite college basketball (and maybe any sport) stat ever.
22/24 National Champions since 1999 have finished the season inside KenPom’s top 20 in both offensive efficiency and defense efficiency.
I absolutely love KenPom. College basketball’s inconsistency and randomness is what makes the sport so great, but being able to have some sort of true baseline of how good teams are, and exactly what they’re good or bad it is incredible. There’s 362 D1 college basketball teams, and KenPom allows you figure out the style and true rating of each team pretty easily. I highly suggest subscribing to KenPom as the advanced settings are awesome and just to support someone doing great work.1
The 2 teams that won the National Title and were NOT top 20 in both offense and defense were the 2021 Baylor Bears (2nd in offense, 22nd in defense) and the 2014 UCONN Huskies (39th in offense, 10th in defense). The other 22 champions finished the season inside the top 20, which shows you have to be able to score and defend at elite levels to truly win a national title. As someone who LOVES March Madness brackets and pools, this stat gives us a pool of true title contenders each season. One caveat here, the champion finished the season inside the 20/20 club, so it is possible for a team barely outside or barely inside to play themselves in/out of the 20/20 club. Entering the tournament last year, here were the teams that in consideration:
-Houston (6th offense, 8th defense)
-Alabama (19th offense, 6th defense)
-Purdue (1st offense, 22nd defense)
-UCLA (23rd offense, 3rd defense)
-Kansas (25th offense, 17th defense)
-UCONN (8th offense, 20th defense)
As you can guess I took Houston to win it all and they lost in the Sweet 16 (Marcus Sasser’s groin injury will forever haunt me), but I did decide to place a future on the 4 teams inside the 20/20, and UCONN cashed 15-1. Here are the pre-tourney March 16th, 2023 odds:
I had a Houston +600, Alabama +700 and UCONN +1500 ticket last year. This stat did give you a pool of 3-6 teams in 2023, and usually 5-8 teams typically year to year that are true title contenders.
Alabama fell to 20th in defense post tourney, UCLA offense, Kansas offense and Purdue defense finished remained outside the top 20 too. UCONN’s defense though improved from 20th to 7th overall. UCONN did win 9 of their last 11 Big East games including a 3 point loss on the road to KenPom’s #12 team Creighton and a close 2 point loss to KenPom’s #10 team Marquette in the Big East tourney.
Like I said earlier in the post, ASU2 is dead and I need something to look for on a nightly basis in college basketball. That’s where the Goldy Happens KenPom Watch List comes into play…
As of January 30th, here is the Goldy Happens KenPom Watch List:
Houston (1st overall, 15th offense, 1st defense)3
Purdue (2nd overall, 2nd offense, 12th defense)
UCONN (3rd overall, 3rd offense, 24th defense)
UofA (4th overall, 6th offense, 13th defense)4
Auburn (6th overall, 16th offense, 3rd defense)
UNC (7th overall, 19th offense, 4th defense)
Kansas (15th overall, 22nd offense, 22nd defense)
These 7 teams according to the 20/20 stat are the current title contender leaders. My “in the hunt” honorable mentions would be:
Tennessee (5th overall, 28th offense, 2nd defense but just lost as 12.5 point home favorites to South Carolina, hard to consider a Rick Barnes team a real title contender with that March track record)
Alabama (8th overall, 1st offense, 67th defense really fun watch but those splits make you primed for a March upset)
Illinois (9th overall, 5th offense, 33rd defense)
BYU (10th overall, 8th offense, 25th defense they were as high as 4th overall a few weeks ago but they lost 4 of their first 6 Big 12 games)
Duke (12th overall, 10th offense, 34th defense)
Marquette (14th overall, 27th offense, 16th defense)
I hope you enjoyed something a little different, promise the next posts will be Diamondbacks related again.
-@GoldyHappens
Every stat I used for this post is available on KenPom as a free feature, once again I highly suggest following KenPom on SubStack + subscribing to his website!
ASU is 215th in offense, 115 overall, yuck.
Houston plays Kansas this Saturday
UofA in 2023 finished 10th in offense but 39th in defense, which put up a red flag before they lost as a 2 seed vs 15 seed Princeton last year. I know UofA fans are frustrated with their consistency (which is a problem in a tournament where you need to win 6 games in a row) but their 2023-24 metrics are much stronger than 2022-23.