Sports

KenPom’s Minimum Qualifying Standards

With football nearly in the rearview, my focus has turned to basketball, and for me that is mostly college basketball. Yes, the NBA is a better product, but for some reason I always gravitate to watching college more. I can’t explain it.

The eye is always toward the March Madness tournament. And who can win it. I’m a fan of KenPom, TeamRankings, Torvik, all of it.

One of the things I look at heading in is teams who meet the minimum required rankings of past national champions. Basically, “no team ranked lower than <this> has ever won the title.

Criteria

One of the decision trees is pretty easy to track, so it is always the first one I look at. It uses some of the KenPom metrics. So, here goes:

  1. Adjusted Margin of Victory (AdjEM)–No team ranked lower than 25 has won. The median is 2.5.
  2. Adjusted Offense (AdjO)–Lowest ranked team was 37. Median is 5.
  3. Adjusted Defense (AdjD)–Lowest ranked team was 38. Median is 7.
  4. Strength of Schedule (SOS AdjEM)–Lowest ranked team was 45. Median is 7.

I have seen some who further limit the O and D rankings to Top 20 and Top 25, respectively. I certainly weight those heavier, but for now, I include just the minimum rankings. Reminder, these rankings are heading into the tournament, not after the tournament.

This Year’s Qualifiers, So Far

So, at the end of January, here are the teams meeting the minimum standards:

Purdue, Arizona, Tennessee, North Carolina, Illinois, Marquette, Kansas, Michigan State.

Top Team Disqualifiers

Houston is number one in KenPom rankings, by a healthy margin, but get disqualified by a SOS of 50. That number should go up as they get further into Big 12 play. UConn, similarly has a SOS of 51 and Auburn is at 55. Alabama’s 67th ranked defense knocked them off the list, while BYU’s SOS of 77 did them in. That rounds out the top 10 teams not making the cut.

If you want to tighten up the middle two metrics to the above suggested T20 and T25, the last four qualifiers all drop off, which leaves you with just four: Purdue, Arizona, Tennessee and UNC. I will circle back around to this exercise again in a month.

3/9 Update: Current list now includes: Houston, Purdue, Arizona, Tennessee, UNC, Creighton and Marquette.

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