Three BIG games under NW’s belt. Three 20+ point blowout losses. At least CCC is consistent?
Kenpom predicted NW (7-9, 0-3) would lose 59-76 at Iowa City. That was too optimistic. NW lost 67-93. At some point kenpom and the gamblers are bound to catch onto
what we already know. That is for the time being
one must disregard any semblance of improvement gained during the CBC
Era. We’re right back to where NW basketball
left off when CBC was hired. The painful reality is that NW really is
THAT bad.
We tweeted during the game that it was as if we were
watching a slow motion train wreck. During
a restless night of sleep disturbed by depressing thoughts of beloved NW
basketball we came up with a better analogy: the rising tide of a gentle body
of water with its gentle waves relentlessly pushing NW backwards with minimal resistance. #NUEra
While the game was another basketball equivalent of a two hour root
canal sans pain killers NW managed to score more than kenpom had projected. With that in mind we had
expected that the AdjO figure would improve.
It did not.
The AdjO slipped another 9 spots to 275th “best” offense in the land. The “good news” is that the free fall will have to stop at some point. There is only so much lower NW can go on offense with only about 75 more rungs to fall. C’mon CCC!!!! Can’t you at least apply the brakes enough to gently asymptote our way to the bottom? Please we beg of you. Hasn’t this vomit-inducing free fall gone on long enough? #NUEra
For completeness we feel compelled to point out that the
AdjD slipped only 4 spots despite
giving up 90+ points. #NUEra!!!!
But overall the team dropped 12 spots to #167. That is over 100 spots below the average
rankings during the NIT years and 35 below even last year. #NUEra
That reminds us. Can anyone recommend a good thesaurus? We’re going to run out of synonyms for awful
before long!
B1G GAMBLE Report
For some time we’ve been planning to augment our GAMBLE
Reports with a secondary comparison of performances in B1G games only. It’s early yet but so what?
As you will see the results are so appallingly bad that it’s noteworthy even with its statistical
shortcomings.
We have entitled this secondary analysis the “B1G GAMBLE
Report” for two reasons. One is that we
think titles ought to be descriptively accurate. Check.
Secondly the “Big” part of the title is apt because the stakes increase in
conference play and this is when the light is shining most brightly on how big the gamble has been made on the inexperienced
CCC who must match wits and rosters with peers who are among the best of best.
For this analysis we compare kenpom’s ranking of NW relative
to its B1G peers using the results from conference games only.
This distinction means that the scale of comparison is quite different
than for the larger samples size used in the GAMBLE Reports. For the
BIG Gamble Report the maximum ranking is 12 (i.e., the number of teams in the
B1G) while for the GAMBLE Report it is 351.
As an aside we can’t wait ‘til next year when NW will become
the first team to finish 14th in the Big Ten. NW is good at digging its way to new ground. But we digress. So without further ado behold the debut of
the B1G GAMBLE Report!!!!!
The first thing to notice is that NW is dead last in the B1G
in both AdjO and AdjD. If it holds up CCC will have "achieved" a new low that is worse than even the highly forgettable 2007 and 2008 seasons. #NUEra
The hapers will no doubt be quick to point out that being dead last is nothing new for NW. Why even CBC and his ballyhooed offense was the worst offensive rebounding team in the B1G during 2013. And on defense we all know how terrible NW was under CBC. It comes as no surprise NW was the worst overall defensive team in B1G play last year and was dead last in eFG% and defensive rebounding too. No wonder we needed a #NUEra!
That’s all true enough. What's also true is that within these categories CCC has fared just as poorly as CBC did in his injury plagued 2013 season. #NUEra?
To split the hairs we noted the nominal comparison of these
statistical categories where CCC had nowhere to go but up but has so far failed to do so. In each case CCC’s 2014 team has
underperformed even last year’s hamstrung team.
#NUEra
Things are so bad this year that we won't even bother with comparisons to the NIT Years. It's simply a waste of time since it's a foregone conclusion that this team is going to fare very poorly when compared to CBC's best squads.
