September Round-Up: A bunch of article ideas that didn't get made

various "failures" but ALSO various "quasi-successes"

It’s mid-September, baby. You know what that means!

(checking the calendar)

Oh. It’s college football season, which, for the record, I am enjoying. BUT! More importantly, college basketball season begins in a hair over six weeks. Practices are beginning very soon across the country as well. As far as I’m concerned, the offseason is over! We made it! The Almanac is out! Oh, and there were/are a lot of ideas I promised I’d look into this offseason that I…uhhh…did not look into. Or I didn’t have enough time to do so.

This newsletter aimed to keep content coming out hot and fresh throughout April-September, and until early July or so I think we were on a good path there. Unfortunately, life gets in the way. I do this newsletter on the side along with a M-F day job, and said day job got really busy over the last two months. (We’ll discuss this a little bit in the season-opening essay.) A lot of things I’d actually done research on and even discussed with a few coaches/basketball people I keep in frequent contact with had to get shoved to the background while the day job took over.

Plus, other personal life events - nothing serious, don’t fret - got in the way, too. This is all a long way of saying that I have a lot of article concepts and ideas that simply didn’t get made.

Instead of doing what I probably should do as an independent writer, protecting these ideas and concepts for my own and waiting until next offseason to really get to them, I’m going to present them here. All of what I use is public-ish data; there is no reason that someone reading this couldn’t do the research themselves, get some publicity, and further their own knowledge of the college hoops world. My thought here is that I personally might not have the time to look into these, but a reader or fellow writer might. Chances are they could pursue it just as well as I would have if not further. So: let’s see what happens.

IDEA #1: Is it actually better to take mid-range jumpers versus floaters?

This is one I’ve wanted to look into ever since Scott Davenport at Bellarmine, a brilliant coach, swore up and down that he refused to coach his players to take shots off of one foot. The quote (which I didn’t use) was something along the lines of “if you take every other shot off of two feet, why would you take this one off of one foot?” That was four summers ago and I think about it several times a season, mostly whenever I see an ill-advised floater from a guard turn into an obvious brick.

I got as far as running a couple of at-home experiments during the summer in which I took floaters from 7-10 feet followed by jumpers from 7-10 feet. Both times, coincidentally, I hit the exact same number of shots whether it was off of one foot or two. I’m also just one guy who wasn’t a good basketball player after about 8th grade, so I wanted to see how this worked for actually good players in college.

The problem is that there’s not a super-obvious way to run this data. CBB Analytics offers distance ranges of 5-10 feet and 10-15 feet, both of which are useful…but they don’t break it down into floaters versus jumpers. Synergy offers a floaters versus jumpers breakdown, but they don’t break down floaters by distance range, instead choosing to lump it into one large pile. They also only break down two-point jumpers by if they’re less or more than 17 feet from the rim, which is barely helpful.

The closest anyone has gotten to an answer here is unsurprisingly Jordan Sperber of Hoop Vision:

Synergy classifies two-point jump shots into two bins: Short jumpers and medium jumpers. Short jumpers are from less than 17 feet. Medium jumpers are from 17 feet to the three-point line.

• The NCAA average on short jumpers last season was 38%

• The NCAA average on medium jumpers last season was 35%

However, there is a third category of shot attempts that I chose to include in my mid-range shot attempts: Floaters.

I wrote a whole newsletter on floaters back in 2021, but the reason for including them in mid-range shot attempts is the similarity in efficiency. Floaters were actually made at a slightly lower percentage than short jumpers.

• The NCAA average on floaters last season was 37%

If we combine all three of those shot types into one mid-range category, the average points per shot on a mid-range shot attempt last season was just 0.74 points.

In theory, that means that short(er) jumpers are probably worth about 1% or so more than an average floater. Does that fully answer the question, though? I’m unsure. Whether it’s me or not me I’d like to see this concept pushed further.

IDEA #2: Who has the best strength/conditioning programs?

This isn’t a stats-based one unless it is. I talked to an ACC staff member about this during the season, as well as an ESPN announcer, and both said some form of “I have no idea how you’d measure that but I’d like to see you try.” This was inspired by watching Houston, whose entire team is made up of the scariest guys at any YMCA workout floor.

How this is measured objectively is beyond me and I’m not sure it’s possible. I considered using consistency in OREB% year-over-year, as well as some sort of steal/block rate, but a good bit of both of those are philosophy-dependent. I don’t think that Indiana, for example, is less physically tough than a Purdue or Houston just because they don’t pound the offensive boards as well. It’s just not in their DNA to do so.

I think this is one for The Almanac writers to consider, because they all actually work in basketball to some extent. Can we get some interviews on the books with the Garrett Medenwalds of the world? Is this something I have to do? This was all inspired by B1G_Ryan on Twitter, by the way, who hates college basketball but loves college football strength coach discussion.

IDEA #3: How much time does a foul-happy/review-happy referee add to the average game?

This one is somewhat simple to answer, at least in some way. Among referees who reffed at least 40 games last year, the guy who calls the fewest fouls per game was Sun Belt/SoCon guy John Hampton, who oversaw games with an average of 29.4 foul calls. Compare that to whistle legend Shawn Lehigh of the Mountain West/West Coast/WAC, who paced the field for a second straight year at 38.5 foul calls. That’s a nine-foul difference! How much longer is that making games at a time in which everyone generally wants games to take less time?

Somewhat unsurprisingly, Ken Pomeroy did write something on this already back in early 2020. The average personal foul adds about 23 seconds, while the average free-throw attempt is about 12 seconds in total. If you think of the rough equivalent of one free throw attempt equaling one foul (the actual number is about 1.05 FTAs to every 1 foul), that means Shawn Lehigh is making games about 5.3 minutes longer on average than John Hampton, with everything else about his refereeing performance excluded.

As Pomeroy also notes, however, monitor reviews add nearly a minute and a half to the average game. There is no public data for this among officials, and it would require watching a lot of games - including every single game Pat Adams officiated in 2022-23 - to come to an acceptable answer as to who’s responsible for the most monitor reviews. That could be something that a team of people work together to find out.

IDEA #4: Do some conferences really have different officiating than others?

This is a really complicated one to nail. Patrick Mayhorn, who writes about Utah State at the Aggship, asked this early in the offseason. The easy answer you can go for is that some conferences have fewer fouls than others. For instance, the Big Ten had about 0.28 free throw attempts to every field goal attempt this past season; the SWAC was at 0.39. That’s ~6 fewer free throw attempts, and reasonably 5-6 fewer fouls, per team per game. That’s a huge gap!

The problem is this: a reasonable amount of that can be explained away as philosophy. The SWAC’s defenses are uniformly mega-aggressive on defense, force tons of turnovers, and would rather foul than allow an easy layup. The Big Ten is almost universally made up of conservative defenses that keep everything in front of them, have big tall boys at center, and features very few turnovers per game.

The other aspect of this is that there aren’t Big Ten referees, or SEC referees, or anything referees. As an example, take Ron Groover, who finished last year as KenPom’s #10 referee. Groover primarily works ACC games and did 34 of his 101 games last year at that conference’s home arenas. One would probably look at him and say “that’s an ACC referee.” That isn’t really true, given that Groover also worked 11 games at SEC arenas, 10 AAC conference games, and the Atlantic 10 championship game. He’s primarily an East Coast referee, not an ACC-specific one.

That dynamic exists with every single referee in every conference in America. Every official you get pissed at during the season works maybe a third of their games in the conference you’re mad at. Do I think the Big Ten has different officiating guidelines or suggestions than the SWAC? Sure. Do I think that explains everything away as “Big Ten refs”? Not really. This one’s TBD.

IDEA #5: Shooting percentages with different basketballs

TBD. I would like to do a super deep dive on this next season.

IDEA #6: Length of actual game time vs. clock game time when teams have 3 timeouts left under 2 minutes

Via Trilly Donovan. This will be a team effort if you choose to do it, but I love the concept.