2010-11 Previews Coming

Just a heads up to everybody that I'm working on my 2010-11 conference previews, and hope to post the first batch tonight. That's not to say I'll only be doing conference previews. I'll also be talking about the upcoming Tournament games. I hope to have a preview of the second weekend tomorrow night. But mostly I'm already starting to pivot to the next season. As my regular readers know, I always have a preview of all 31 automatic bid conferences, as well as the new BP65, within a week of the end of the NCAA Tournament.

The previews will be similar to the way they've been in the past. The BCS conferences each will get their own post. The other conferences will be multiple conferences per post, with "mid-major" conferences separated from "small" conferences. Fans of "small" conferences have gotten mad at me in the past for insulting their conferences, but that is not my intention. I'm just looking to have an organization to all of this - it doesn't affect how I rate individual teams.

One diference this season will be that I will be replacing "returning starters" with "Pomeroy experience". I always thought "returning starters" was fairly arbitrary because sometimes it's subjective who a "starter" is if one guy starts and plays 15 minutes per game, versus a teammate who comes off the the bench and plays 25 minutes per game. Also, it says nothing about key reserves. The Pomeroy Experience rating weights the total minutes played, and the class of those players on the floor. A freshman is worth 0, and a senior is worth 3, so if all you do is play five juniors at all times you get a Pomeroy Experience rating of 2.00. If half of your minutes go to seniors, and half go to sophomores, you get the same score. I will give both the actual rating, as well as the national ranking out of all 347 teams. So the team with a Pomeroy Experience rank of 1st gave the highest percentage of minutes of all teams in the nation to older players. One caveat is that I didn't actually save the data until earlier today, so it will actually include data from the first weekend of the postseason tournaments, but that shouldn't affect the results much.

The other stats included will be conference record, total record and RPI. All of those stats are from the end of the conference tournaments, and do not include any NIT, NCAA, CBI or CIT results.

Stay tuned!