You're Dead To Me, Mooney

The New York Times' Pete Thamel wrote about Ken Pomeroy and the mini-revolution within college basketball caused by his website; it's fascinating to me primarily to see who does and does not use the site. As a huge tempo-free stats fan boy with a blog what for opinionating, I'm always on the lookout for coaches--like Brad Stevens, Sean Miller, and Buzz Williams--who prove themselves worthy of an inappropriate amount of affection as well as coaches deserving of my scorn:

While they have not been universally embraced — programs like Connecticut and Richmond do not use them at all — advanced analytics have emerged as valuable preparation tools. Stevens uses Pomeroy’s numbers to seek trends in losses and to identify teams’ strengths and weaknesses. It is all part of trying to crack the code of the opposition.

Mooney! Sir, this I cannot abide. I'm surprised a Princeton grad is not a little more with it, to be honest. Maybe he just can't bear to look at his team's defensive rebounding percentage. I could understand that.

"In most offices the water cooler gossip is about last night’s television shows," Danny Peters, a graduate manager at Arizona, said. "We talk about KenPom."

[snip]

Arizona Coach Sean Miller values offensive rebounding percentage so much that he uses the statistic during timeouts and at halftime.

This contest is over. Give that man the three million dollars.

Thamel goes on to talk about Synergy, a video scouting system that provides coaches with just about any piece of information imaginable. The Winn piece I linked earlier outlines how Buzz Williams used Synergy to help his team beat Xavier in the first round of the NCAAs. Winn uses Synergy data almost every week in his power rankings and it's all I can do to keep myself from drooling. Anybody got five grand I can borrow? That's what the service costs.

For whatever it's worth, I'm pretty certain that Sidney Lowe's staff never used Pomeroy's website.

Updated: Almost forgot: bring out the big board.