Offensive Review, Part I, as I use math

So, we have looked at the defense...now to look at the offense.  I was actually really surprised when I looked at this number.  What I expected was something closer to what I felt, which was that the Falcons had trouble (as they say) scoring the ball.  But, in fact, the offense was better than I thought.

In fact, in conference games, BG scored 1.03 points per possession, which was 4th in the MAC.  Given that BG was third in the MAC in points per possession allowed (.96), you have to wonder how we finished 6th.

That difference of .07 per possession doesn't sound like a lot, but in basketball it is pretty big.  In fact, only Akron and Ohio had a higher spread.  That shouldn't be for a 9-7 team.

Here we journey into statistics land.  We are going to apply something created for baseball by Bill James...the pythagorean theory.  The idea is very basic.  Winning a game means that if you score more points, you should win more games.  If you score a lot more points, you should win a lot more games.

The exact relationship---how much difference, how many wins---is where the math guys come in.  Logically, there is no reason to think the same thing would not work for basketball.

Here is the baseball formula...

Now, the basketball formula is going to be a little bit different, because we're scoring 100 points a game (with bigger differences) so the exponent (the little raised number) will have to be higher.  Ken Pomeroy of kenpom.com has done some actual math stuff, running a log5 analysis (oh no he di'nt) and determined the exponent should be 10.25.  So we used that.

So, you run that formula, you get an expected winning percentage, reflect that into actual wins and compare to the season's average....to wit...

So, based on their statistical results, BG should have won 11 games and finished in a tie for 3rd.   Instead, BG won 9 and finished 6th.  In fact, the only team that underperformed more was WMU, who finished on the plus side in terms of scoring and yet was 6-10, putting themselves in the negative side.  This is called the Diophantan exception.

OK, its not.

The point is that BG's results were not in line with what you would expect.  Both our offense and our defense was good enough for us to have the kind of team we would have expected to have.

Now, there are two theories (that I have) for why it happened that way.  One is that BG's trouble closing games caused them to lose games they should have won.  This is hard to imagine, though, because you would still end up with fewer points if you lost the game.  Which leads to the second theory, which I will examine---and that is that BG didn't have good defense and good offense at the same times, which could distort the averages.

Anyway, inside all that is a relatively simply point.  A team that had those kind of scoring stats in a 16 game schedule should certainly have gotten better results than this team got.