I just received a strange phone call from some high school senior name Kenny Pomeroy. Kenny told me that he is working on a system to rate college basketball teams. He said that he probably won't make his ratings publicly available for another 15 years or so, but if I wanted to get a sense of what his ratings might look like for the 1991 season, I should check out the
Simple Rating System (SRS) results for 1991 which are fairly close to his ratings.
Here are the SRS ratings for Duke's region*
Code:
Seed |
Team |
SRS |
SRS Rank |
1 |
Ohio State |
21.15 |
9 |
2 |
Duke |
24.90 |
4 |
3 |
Nebraska |
18.47 |
13 |
4 |
St. John's (NY) |
14.19 |
29 |
5 |
Texas |
14.82 |
26 |
6 |
Louisiana State |
17.83 |
15 |
7 |
Iowa |
10.75 |
47 |
8 |
Georgia Tech |
16.27 |
20 |
9 |
DePaul |
12.89 |
33 |
10 |
East Tennessee State |
11.65 |
44 |
11 |
Connecticut |
16.56 |
18 |
12 |
Saint Peter's |
6.53 |
86 |
13 |
Northern Illinois |
7.54 |
74 |
14 |
Xavier |
4.50 |
102 |
15 |
Louisiana-Monroe |
0.76 |
130 |
16 |
Towson |
-3.48 |
177 |
Based on SRS ratings, it appears that Duke ended up with a somewhat favorable bracket. The SRS ratings say that Ohio State is the weakest 1 seed, so I like Duke's chances should they somehow meet OSU in the Elite 8. Plus, while Coach K has struggled in the Final 4, his teams never lose in the Elite 8.
Elsewhere in the bracket, Nebraska seems about average for a 3 seed and they will face a tough match-up in the 2nd round with the winner of the 6/11 game between LSU and Connecticut, both of whom are under-seeded top 18 SRS teams.
Georgia Tech, #20 in the SRS, also appears to be under-seeded as an 8 seed.
If you apply the Log5 method (something else Kenny told me about, but I don't claim to understand) to the SRS ratings, you get the following estimate of each team's chances of winning the region.
Code:
Seed |
Team |
Chance of Winning Region |
2 |
Duke |
47.2% |
1 |
Ohio State |
24.3% |
3 |
Nebraska |
8.4% |
6 |
Louisiana State |
4.4% |
5 |
Texas |
4.0% |
8 |
Georgia Tech |
3.8% |
4 |
St. John's (NY) |
3.1% |
11 |
Connecticut |
2.7% |
9 |
DePaul |
0.9% |
10 |
East Tennessee State |
0.6% |
7 |
Iowa |
0.4% |
13 |
Northern Illinois |
0.1% |
12 |
Saint Peter's |
0.1% |
14 |
Xavier |
0.0% |
15 |
Louisiana-Monroe |
0.0% |
16 |
Towson |
0.0% |
By the way, before we hung up, I told young Kenny Pomeroy that he might consider switching to a snappy two syllable moniker if he ever wants to gain widespread recognition.
*Note from 2020: The SRS ratings in the chart are final ratings which include tournament performance. As such, it is likely that Duke's pre-tourney SRS rating was a couple points lower and may or may not have been better than Ohio State's. Either way, OSU was probably the weakest 1 seed as the other 1 seeds finished in the top 3 of the SRS.