Experience and MAC Men's Hoops

When you look ahead at the season, one thing is really remarkable:  Akron won last year with a really young team.

Because we don't get players who are one and done (or three and done) very often, MAC hoops tends to be very senior dominated.  A team with productive seniors will win its share of games.

This observation is bolstered by recent developments out of BG:

The last two times we have seriously challenged for or won a division title were last year (Miller, Clements, Moten) and the Reimold-Almanson year.

Conversely, our Dark Years of Infinite Frustration were when no one stayed long enough to become a senior.

With that in mind, a couple of fact nuggets for you.  First, let's look at how much scoring and rebounding each team lost since last year.  (Note this counts transfers....especially hard hit was CMU).

A few thoughts here.  The Rockets were awful AND they lost a lot.  BG and Miami at least had something to show for their senior domination.  OU was hit a little harder on the rebounding side.  And look at Akron down there, bringing tons back from a really good team.

I'm telling you, Keith Dambrot is going to build himself a new job soon.

Now, I am a big fan of statsheet.com.  This guy has excellent data on college hoops, and he is fully on board with the latest ways of looking at the game---notably tempo-free stats and the four key factors to winning.

Below is a little analysis he did of last year's MAC season, looking at winning percentage against average class per minute (ie, if you played only seniors, you would be a 4).  There are certainly some odd data points, but look at the four teams on the far right of the chart to get an idea what I am talking about.

NCAA Basketball Stats