More MAC Hoops--Did everyone play a slow tempo?

So, continuing our look back at the MAC basketball season, I started to look at some of the more innovative statistical approaches, which includes tempo-based stats that look at efficiency per possession as opposed to raw totals.

During the course of the season, I sort of lost interest in that because, it seemed to me, there was no one in the MAC playing significantly differently than anyone else. There didn't seem to be any up-tempo teams--everybody seemed to be playing a defensively oriented game.

And that is what I want to test. To start with, I took ken pomeroy's stats, which include all D-1 games. Here is what we get for tempo for the MAC (the number below is possessions per game).


I would contend that what we have here is pretty narrow band of styles. Nationally, the range was from 57 to 80, and we are squarely in the middle of that range. '

More telling is that the national average was 66.5 possessions per game...and as you can see above, only one team in the MAC played at even an average Division I tempo--and that was only by a slim margin.

So part one of the hypothesis is proven, in my mind. There were two kinds of hoops in the MAC. Slow and slower.

It is possible, of course, to have a good offensive team even in a slow set. If you are efficient, you can maximize those limited possessions and then take advantage of the fact that you are giving the other team the same number of chances. Let's look at the MAC figures in offensive efficiency....


Nationally, offensive efficiency was about 101 (which means 1.01) points per possession. And, as you can see here, only Buffalo and Kent were close to the national average, while most teams (10) in the conference were below average in terms of offensive efficiency. Once again, the band seems pretty narrow to me here, too.

I guess my only points are these:

• The MAC played pretty uniform ball, across the board. That means slow, low-scoring games.
• In a conference with 12 teams, it seems to me that you would expect to have at least one or two teams playing a different style, but that was not the case.
• It will be interesting to see if this was a trend. There were not a ton of offensive playmakers in the league, and those that did have them (David Kool, for example) did not have the supporting cast to make it work.