How much stock do you place in Ken Pom, etc.?

[JRHawk2003]

Or Jerry Palm and his RPI stuff?

It only really seems to matter if you are a bubble team.

It seems to me that we over analyze stuff like this with stats like adjusted offense/defense. The eye test will pretty much tell you if a team can score or defend.

Do a lot of people pay for a Ken Pom subscription and why would someone?

 

[L. Wade Childress]

Advanced stats help you understand how good a team is rather than what the resume looks like. To me it is useful because it helps me manage expectations from game to game. It is also useful for running Monte Carlo simulation as far as how conference standings might end up. There has to be some sort of way to predict possible outcomes of games other than flipping a coin.

 

[DanL53]

The eye test?

No. Box scores, interviews, podcasts, for some folks at least watching the game! KenPom is a great tool. The last four years? 2nd, 19th, 28th, 25th. Meanwhile people using the eye test have questioned how long we should give McCaffery.

And frankly one doesn't have to spend a cent (though it makes it easier and I highly recommend the Lounge) if one does the work to learn about the teams and games. I've never bothered with a subscription to KenPom, their free stuff is good enough.

 

[soybean]

If we were 30 days farther down the road I'd take all of these projections much more seriously.

 

[icantfindausernamethatisntused]

I believe the KenPom rankings are the best available for determining how "good" a team is (i.e., predicting future performance.

With that said, the last time I checked his formula there were still flaws that he would admit to. The primary flaw I remember was that there was not yet a component to account for injuries and whether a team was at full strength for any given game. In the grand scheme of things, this does not matter much in the final rankings, but it can produce some minor miscalculations. For example, we played Wichita State without some of their best players and we played Michigan State without Valentine in one of our games - I don't think there is anything in his model that accounts for this and therefore one could say our ranking is slightly inflated.

Regardless, this Iowa team has played like one of the top 5 teams in the country to this point, and if we would have held onto our big lead against Iowa State that is where we'd be ranked.

 

[hawkeyemike23]

Well RPI and KenPom are completely different. RPI is a very simplistic, win/loss, opponents winning percentage and opponents' opponent winning percentage calculation. KenPom is much better at looking beyond the record to determine how teams compare. I think it's well worth the $15/year subscription cost.

 

[AHS2001]

I do pay for his website and I think it is well worth the 20 dollars a year. He posts some blogs also during conference tourney time puts a lot of information out. In addition you can see his all conference teams and kenpom poy standings which has uthoff at 2 in the nation.

 

[83Hawk]

I think KenPom, RPI, etc are useful as tools to get a general feeling of where a team fits in the grand scheme of things, as opposed to the polls which give undue weight to the name on the front of the jersey.

The only measurement that really matters occurs on the court in March.