stunning metrics make these teams special

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Duke, Florida, Auburn, Houston punch their ticket to the Final Four

The madness continues as Mackenzie Salmon previews the Men’s Final Four matchups, which will feature all No. 1 seeds for the first time since 2008.

Sports Seriously

ATLANTA – All hail Ken Pomeroy; the king of the calculator, the seer of the stats, the architect of the analytics and the executive of efficiency.

For more than a decade, a website run by a former meteorologist and atmospheric sciences instructor has been the numbers-based Bible of college basketball. Pomeroy’s formula ranks teams by a variety of different metrics including offensive efficiency, defensive efficiency, tempo and luck. But his top-line number assigned to each team, calculated from data over thousands of possessions across the season, is pretty much the gold standard in terms of predicting on a game-to-game basis which team is more likely to win.

And this year?

Pomeroy absolutely nailed it. After nearly 6,271 college basketball games this season, his numbers didn’t just have Duke, Houston, Florida and Auburn as the four best teams in the country; it had those teams ahead of the pack by a wide margin.

In fact, since the beginning of his data in 1997, just 10 teams have had a total Net Rating of +35 or more in his formula. Three of them won the championship, two lost in the championship game, one in the semifinals.

The other four? They’ll be in San Antonio next weekend.

“The four teams that advanced I think are the four best teams in the country,” Auburn coach Bruce Pearl said. “That doesn’t always happen.”

In fact, it almost never happens.

Last year, the Final Four included a team ranked 14th (Alabama) and 45th (NC State). The year before that, 14th (San Diego State), 17th (Florida Atlantic) and 24th (Miami). That’s college basketball. That’s the tournament. Small margins, almost no room for error.

Even KenPom’s computers can’t make perfect predictions about a game played by humans. That’s why, when people really…

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Source link : https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/columnist/dan-wolken/2025/03/30/mens-ncaa-tournament-final-four-ken-pomeroy/82734840007/

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Publish date : 2025-03-31 02:12:00

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