I have reviewed the statistics for the Texas game and make the following observations;

• We are having trouble recently executing our offense
• We are brain-dead at the free throw line
• We have a ton of weapons and they compliment each other well
• Our defense is pretty solid (at least statistically)
• Our ball-handling is getting right down stupendous lately (relatively speaking)
• We are much stronger against teams who focus on the interior game
• Overall we use the three point shot effectively
• We are an improving team!!!!!!

There is one residual benefit to poor shooting, namely the opportunity for more rebounds. We availed ourselves of that opportunity against the Longhorns with a season high 55 rebounds. That equates to 57.3% of the rebounds in the game. That is well above our season average of 55.5% and one of our better games. Ironically we did it more on the offensive end than on the defensive end. We grabbed 48.8% of the offensive boards a whopping 10.3% above our season average. Drew was the monster with 6 of his 12 rebounds off the offensive glass. Eric chipped in with 5 and even Boschee had a season high 2 offensive boards. Unfortunately as good as we were on the offensive end we were equally bad on the defensive end. We did grab 63.6% of the defensive boards but that is well below our season average of 70.1%. Our average in conference play is 65.5% so we were even a little below that. Overall it was a nice rebounding effort against a smaller but stronger team. On the offensive end we had our second consecutive PPP below 0.900. Our PPP for the Texas game was 0.891. We have been below 0.900 only 5 times this year. We lost two of those games and barely beat Ohio State. Oklahoma was the other one. It was also our fourth consecutive game shooting below 50% from the field. Our FG% for the Texas game was 45.9% and is the very same 45.9% over the last four games. We are shooting 48.1% in conference play compared to 52.4% in non-conference games. Our season shooting % is 50.6%. We are in danger of losing our NCAA Div I lead in FG%. Nick is still shooting over 60% from the field on the year but Kirk has fallen below 50% (48.5%), Eric has fallen below 45% (44.5%), and Luke has fallen below 40% (39.1%). Here are some alarming numbers. In conference play Eric is shooting 38.6% from the field, Kirk is shooting 41.1% and Luke is shooting 31%. We will not fare well with those numbers unless those guys quit shooting. Oddly Luke and Eric are the only two players who have, in fact, decreased their shooting in conference play. Eric has been shooting about 15% less and Luke has been shooting about 19% less. Everyone else has increased their shooting by about 3 or 4% with the exception of Drew who has stepped up his shooting frequency by a whopping 13%.

Here are some other comparisons from conference to non-conference games.

Looking at this plethora of information indicates Boschee has really picked up his play since the beginning of the conference season. Carey has had few minutes but has also played very well in this span. Gooden and Collison have also picked up their games significantly during the conference play while Kirk and Kenny have been about the same or down slightly. Eric is the most marked fall-off. Eric has had several good games in conference he has just been inconsistent. Saying Kenny and Kirk are of slightly is probably a mischaracterization of their play. Arguably the conference season has been a tougher row to how so their numbers are more probably reflective of good consistent play against tougher competition.

Who do you think deserves player of the game. Kenny had the highest gross NEP but I am going to go with Drew. Drew played fewer minutes but played very well. He had a gross NEP only slightly lower than Kenny and had a team leading norm NEP. As a matter of fact Drew's 34.2 norm NEP against Texas is good for the 7th best norm NEP all season. Definitely kudos go to Jeff Boschee, Kenny Gregory and Eric Chenowith also. They each had solid lines. Chenowith had only 8 points but he was huge on the boards and in the paint with 14 rebounds and 4 blocks. Kenny had a team high gross NEP of 21.2 and a very solid norm NEP of 26.5. Bo did it all today with 16 points on 6 of 9 shooting and 4 of 6 from three point land. He also had a season high 5 rebounds and as I mentioned above 2 off the offensive glass. In addition he had 1 block, 2 steals, and 4 assists. The only black mark on his line was the 4 TO's, Really one of Jeff's best games all year. He has been very steady and valuable since conference play started. Luke only played 14 minutes and was only 2 for 5 from the field but did some nice things and ended up with a very attractive norm NEP of 22.9. He grabbed 4 rebounds and dished an assist in his brief time. A very encouraging thing about this team is someone comes to play just about every night. Kirk has struggled a bit in the last 3 or 4 games but Bo has picked up the slack. When Drew is off it seems that Nick is always on and vice versa. Kenny has been pretty consistent but has had a few off games and the rest of the team was there to pick it up. The Wake Forest game was really the only game when just about everyone was AWOL. The thing that makes it especially good about this scenario is everyone of these guys can have a night where they score 20+ points or crash the boards or play smothering defense. In years past we have had limited options in certain areas and when that player was off we suffered in that area. This year the parts are much more interchangeable. Are you excited yet?

Here is the NEP data for the Texas game:

Here is the NEP data for the conference season:

NEP -- Season-to-date:

Since number-r-us let's look at some really esoteric stuff. I downloaded all the statistics I could get my hands on for all 320 Division I teams. Unfortunately I could not get much of the defensive data. I then sorted in by all the various categories and looked at how many of the top 35 teams were ranked in the top 25 of that sort. Confused yet? Let me make it a little clearer. First I made a list of every team that was in the top 25 of the AP ranking, the USA Today ranking, the RPI, and the Sagarin ranking. 15 teams were in the top 25 of all four polls. As an aside, based on the RPI and Sagarin rankings there are 4 teams that are being shafted and should be ranked. They are Kentucky, California, Southern Miss, Xavier, and Mississippi. Also based on those rankings there are 5 teams that are clearly overrated by the AP and USA Today polls and should not be ranked. They are (in order of overrating) Connecticut (way overrated), Seton Hall (pretty overrated), Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama. Anyway, I got a list of these 35 teams and we'll call them for arguments sake the Top 35 teams in the country. Then I sorted the data for all 320 Division I teams by some category, say FG% for example. Then I looked at how many of these top 35 teams were in the top 25 teams in FG%. In this particular case there were 6 of the top 35 teams in the top 25 in FG%. I then used this number of "6" teams as the "coefficient" for FG%. The theory here is to see which category or variable has the highest coefficient and thus is the most important to having a winning team. I kind of assumed it would logically be scoring average but to my surprise, scoring average came in second. The highest coefficient was for assists. That's right. More top teams were highly ranked in assists than any other category. And guess who ranks No. 1 in assists in the country. That's right!!! None other than your beloved Kansas Jayhawks. In addition to this "coefficient" I also took the average rank of each of these top 35 teams for each of these variables. I call this the "average rank". Catchy, huh? What I mean by this is I ranked all 320 teams for scoring average for instance. Than I averaged the rank of these top 35 teams. In this particular case it came out to be 57.7. That is the second number you will se in the table below. The third number you see is a similar exercise using only the top 10 teams instead of the top 35. I call this the "primo average rank" (sometimes I amaze even myself). Without further adieu here is a breakdown of the variables I used and the coefficients for each.

Looking at this data leads me to these conclusions. 1) Scoring is the critical determinant (duh), 2) Assisting and rebounding are very important also, 3) the better teams aren't necessarily very good FT shooting teams, 4) how much you foul is of little importance and in fact the better teams tend to foul more (interesting), 5) most good teams aren't necessarily good at stealing the ball.

You will be tested on all this on Monday so study up.

If anyone has any ideas on other interesting numbers or analyses please feel free to email me. I will either do it or I won't. It all depends on if I want to or not. But please feel free to ask.

I'm done now.

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