NCAA Basketball: Seeking out title contenders by the numbers
2. Offensive & Defensive Efficiency
Offensive and defensive efficiency have become the most popular advanced metrics in college basketball in recent years, and for good reason. These two metrics, especially when used in conjunction, offer a good predictive measure for the outcome of any basketball game. Thus, it should come as no surprise that they can also be used to gauge the likelihood of team success in March.
In the simplest sense, offensive efficiency is a measure of how many points a team scores relative to how many possessions they have during the season. On the flip side, defensive efficiency is a measure of how many points a team allows relative to how many possessions their opponents have during the season. These measures provide more insight than their simpler cousins (points scored per game and points allowed per game) because they inherently adjust for the pace of play within the game.
When determining the correlation coefficient (a fancy statistical term for determining how relevant some variable is for determining tournament success, in this case) of each of these, I uncovered a couple of interesting facts. First, I found that a team’s offensive efficiency is marginally more important to succeeding in the tournament than a team’s defensive efficiency. I suppose this doesn’t surprise me too much, especially with the implementation of the NCAA’s freedom of movement policies a few years back. Second, I found that these two factors, especially when used in conjunction, are the most predictive factors (by a wide margin) in projecting NCAA tournament success.
Some of the top teams in efficiency rankings (as measured by Sports Reference) include:
- Offensive Efficiency
- Gonzaga
- Virginia
- Virginia Tech
- Tennessee
- Michigan State
- Duke
- Purdue
- Iowa
- Villanova
- Iowa State
- Defensive Efficiency
- Texas Tech
- Virginia
- Michigan
- Duke
- Houston
- Gonzaga
- Nevada
- Tennessee
- Michigan State
- Wisconsin