A few weeks ago, Spartans Weblog did a rather complete game by game graphical analysis, including trendlines of all the Big Ten schools efficiency numbers for the past season.

I decided to take a look at his Penn State numbers in a little more detail. First some background on the graphs:

Background info

First, some notes on the graphs:

• the data only includes the regular season, the Big Ten Tournament game against Illinois is not included.
• the efficiency numbers don’t distinguish between home and away games but SW says that the trendline should smooth out the home/away differences.
• these are raw efficiency numbers that are not adjusted for the opponent so it’s possible that up or down trends are related to the quality of opposition.
• for offense, the higher the number the better, thus upward trends are good. For defense, lower numbers are better, so downward trends are good.
  trendlines are used to smooth out data.
• Spartan’s Weblog used a third order polynomial trendline. I’m not sure that was the most appropriate trendline to use but SW doesn’t go into his rationale for the choice. Also, some of the reader comments imply there aren’t enough data points for the analysis to be meaningful.

Still the data is interesting to look at.

PSU Efficiency Chart

Here’s Penn State’s chart.

When SW analyzes it, he basically says the defense was poor all year long, the offense started out ok, went downhill with Claxton’s injury, then rebounded as the freshman matured.

I wanted to take this a step further.

Big Ten Tournament

First, I know for reasons of consistency across all teams, Spartans Weblog chose to use only regular season data. Since I was only interested in PSU’s data, I decided to take a look at the numbers including the Big Ten Tournament game against Illinois.

Here’s that graph:

Efficiency Margins

The difference between a team’s offensive and defensive efficiency numbers is called their efficiency margin. Since, by definition, teams have the same number of possessions in any specific game, if you have a positive efficiency margin for a game, you have scored more points than your opponent and thus won the game.

Here’s a graph with Spartan’s Weblog’s choice of a 3rd order polynomial trendline of PSU’s efficiency margin for all their Big Ten games, including tournament play.

Other Trendlines:

Spartan’s Weblog never described his rationale behind choosing a 3rd order polynomial to plot his trendlines. I know little about what defines the appropriate order to choose. I do know that an N-order polynomial will plot a graph that has at most N-1 hills and valleys. So his choice of a 3rd order for the trendline means the graph will have at most one hill and one valley. We see that in the chart of the offensive efficiency. The defensive efficiency just has one hill.

As an experiment, I decided to plot the efficiency margin charts using 2nd through 6th order polynomials, thus providing a graph with at most one hill or valley, in the first case, and five hills and valleys in the last case. Here are those charts.

Efficiency Margin 2nd Order Polynomial Trendline

Efficiency Margin 4th Order Polynomial Trendline

Efficiency Margin 5th Order Polynomial Trendline

Efficiency Margin 6th Order Polynomial Trendline

As you can easily see, the 4th through 6th order polynomials look remarkably similar. They do differ from the 3rd order polynomial in that the 3rd order shows a season ending downturn while the 4th through 6th show a year end improvement (as does the 2nd order polynomial). Someone with a better knowledge of trendlines than I can argue which is more meaningful but my “blue and white goggles”, “glass half full”, “DeChellis lackey” viewpoint is going to choose to dismiss the 3rd order and go with one of the other views.

The NCAA has released the latest Academic Progress Rate (APR) reports.  Here’s how the Big Ten schools stand in basketball.

Illinois - 989
Northwestern - 972
Penn State - 964
Michigan State - 963
Iowa - 944
Wisconsin - 938
Michigan - 927
Minnesota - 910
Ohio State - 909
Indiana - 899
Purdue - 894

925 is the cutoff where sanctions can start to kick in.

Purdue is the only school to receive an “immediate penalty”.  The “immediate penalty” means that if a school has an academically ineligible player leave school, they will not be able to award his scholarship to anyone.  According to the Indy Star, Purdue took their penalty during this past season and played short one scholarship player.

Indiana received a waiver from any sanctions because they have implemented an APR improvement plan that was satisfactory in the NCAA’s eyes (quite possibly, Tom Crean’s hasty departure from the Final Four back to Bloomington was to address this very issue).  However, given the spate of recent departures, I would expect them to have some APR problems next year.

According to Scout, Ohio State wasn’t penalized because they also submitted an APR improvement plan to the NCAA.

Minnesota reportedly avoided the penalty because, despite having an APR below 925, no academically ineligible player left school.

Canadian Interuniversity Sport via kwout

UncleLar Take:

This is the poor man’s version of the foreign tour that the NCAA allows you to take every four years. Rather than have the two-week, ten-game overseas tour that the NCAA allows, many teams book a mini-tour over Labor Day. We’ll undoubtedly play 2-3 more games against Canadian schools over the weekend (by NCAA rule, we can’t play a game against a US squad) with at least one game scheduled for both Saturday and Sunday. A Friday night game is also a possibility, as is a morning/night doubleheader on either Sat/Sun.

The real benefit of these tours is that the NCAA allows you to hold ten days of practice before you head off for the weekend. That’s a pretty nice bonus that can give you a leg up on the season.

Illinois:

- 6-9 forward/center Stan Simpson from Chicago.
- 6-7 Dominique Keller 6-7 junior college in Texas - late signing period
- 6-4 Alex Legion - mid-year transfer from Kentucky

Indiana:

- Devin Ebanks • 6′8″ • 185 • Long Island City, N.Y./St. Thomas More (Conn.) Prep - released from LOI
- Terrell Holloway • 6′0″ • 175 • Hempstead, N.Y./Cincinnati’s Harmony Prep - released from LOI
- Tom Pritchard • 6′8″ • 240 • Westlake, Ohio/Lakewood St. Edward High School
- Matt Roth • 6′3″ • 175 • Washington, Ill./Metamora Washington High School
- Devon Dumes 6-2 Vincennes Junior College - late signing period
- Nick Williams 6-4 a shooting guard from Mobile, AL (originally a Marquette commit)

Iowa:

- Matt Gatens from Iowa City
- Anthony Tucker from Minnetonka, MN
- Andrew Brommer from Rosemount, MN
- Jermain Davis, JC recruit from Kirkwood Community College
- 6-5 guard Dewan Bawinkel, JC recruit from Highland Community College in Freeport, IL - late signing period
- 6-7 forward Aaron Fuller from Mesa AZ - late signing period

Michigan:

- 7′ center Ben Cronin of Syracuse (N.Y)
- 6-3 shooting guard Stu Douglass of Carmel (Ind.)
- 6-5 guard Zach Novak from Chesterton (Ind) - late signing period
- 6-3 guard Laval Lucas-Perry (Flint, Mich./Flint Powers Catholic HS) - transfer from Arizona

Michigan State:

- Draymond Green (F, 6-7, 230, Saginaw, Mich./Saginaw)
- Korie Lucious (G, 5-10, 165, Milwaukee, Wis./St. Pius XI High School)
- Delvon Roe (F, 6-8, 220, Lakewood, Ohio/St. Edward High School)

Minnesota

- Devron Bostick, a 6-4 sophomore LC guard from Southwestern Illinois College
- Paul Carter, a 6-7 freshman forward from Missouri State-West Plains College.
- Colton Iverson, a 6-10 forward/center from Yankton, S.D.
- Ralph Sampson III, from Northview High School in Atlanta, Ga
- Devoe Joseph, a guard from Pickering HS in Ontario Canada (early signee but never announced by Minn)

Northwestern:

- 6-5 G/F Nick Fruendt (Batavia, Ill./Batavia)
- 6-8 F John Shurna (Glen Ellyn, Ill./Glenbard West)
- 6-9 Davide Curletti (Orchard Lake, MI) - late signing period
- 6-10 Luka Mirkovic 6-10 (La Porte, Indiana) - late signing period

Ohio State:

- B.J. Mullens, center from Columbus (ohio) Canal Winchester High School
- William Buford, guard from Toledo (Ohio) Libbey High School
- Anthony Crater, point guard from Flint (Mich.) Southwestern Academy
- Walter Offutt, a guard from Indianapolis Warren Central High School
- Jeremie Simmons, a 6′2″ guard from Mott Community College in Michigan
- Nicola Kecman, a 6′9″ forward from Eastern Arizona College

Penn State:

- 6-8 F Billy Oliver (Chatham, NJ)
- 6-6 G Chris Babb from Arlington (TX) - late signing period
- 6-5 G Cammeron Woodyard from Westminster (MD) - late signing period
- 6-10 F Andrew Ott - mid year transfer from Villanova

Purdue:

- Lewis Jackson, 5-9 guard from Decatur, Ill. (Dwight Eisenhower)
- Ryne Smith, 6-3 guard from Toledo, Ohio (Whitmer)

Wisconsin:

- Jared Berggren, a 6-10, 235-pound forward/center from Princeton, Minn.
- Ian Markolf is a 7-1, 265-pound center from San Antonio, Texas
- Jordan Taylor, a 6-1, 185-pound guard from St. Louis Park, Minn
- Robert Wilson is a 6-4, 185-pound guard/forward from Garfield Heights, Ohio
- Ryan Evans, 6-7 forward from Chandler, Ariz - late signing period

bold equals signees in the late signing period