Friday, January 7, 2011

Big Ten Quadrant Chart

I decided to see how the Big Ten teams would look if we put them into a quadrant chart, using offensive and defensive efficiency as our metrics.  Using the Big Ten average of these metrics as our axis, the further to the right a team is, the better they are on offense, and the higher towards the top they are, the better they are on defense.

So the top right quadrant are teams that are good on offense, good on defense.  Call these the contenders.  Solid teams with no real weaknesses.

The bottom right quadrant are teams that are good on offense, bad on defense.  Call this the unknowns, because they could outscore a team on any given night due to their own firepower or if their opponent has a poor shooting night.  This kind of team could upset anybody or go on a run at any time.

The top left quadrant are teams that are good on defense, bad on offense.  Call these the defensively viable teams, because a team that plays solid defense is always dangerous.

The bottom left quadrant is teams that are bad on defense, bad on offense.  Call these simply "the bad teams" because they are, in fact, really bad.

Now guess where the Gophers land.



10 comments:

Aar Man said...

this makes us look almost as bad as Indiana... oh wait that game was close wasn't it?

Anonymous said...

it's still early. if you normalize for strength of schedule for games played you'd likely get a very different looking graph.

Loretta8 said...

pretty sure those are the KenPom efficiencies, which definitely take strength of schedule into account

WWWWWW said...

Yep, it's from Kenpom.com, which does normalize everything based on opponent.

Frankly, this is just a bad team. Luckily, they have a couple of nice wins and, despite playing awful against the bad teams, have managed to avoid any terrible losses, so they're still in good NCAA shape. But something needs to drastically change.

RPI Is Bull said...

Ken Pom is a well-known Gopher hater. He has the Gophers winning like four more games this year. I didn't know they made crack that potent.

goldybobblehead said...

It is an interesting analysis, but it might look better as a heat map. NW is good on O but not on D, We are just below average on both, but at least neither are a huge liability

Go Gopher Victory said...

$20 says our favorite blogger would write up a huge post about how this is the year if he ran into Al Nolen at BWW or something. He's that fickle.

WWWWWW said...

Who's our favorite blogger?

Mama W said...

Nice chart, nerd. I think you just wanted a reason to use the word "quadrant".

WWWWWW said...

You stay out of here, woman. Get back in the kitchen and make me a sandwich.