Massey’s
maximum likelihood estimation has an underlying assumption: that margin of victory (including transformations on MOV, and linear combinations thereof) are normally distributed (equivalently, their error terms are normally distributed).
Central limit theorem normality (i.e. when there are enough representative games, which under the Quad System normally means in the teeth of conference play) also works.
That is why early season Massey is wacky vs late season. And Massey measures
season-to-date normality — it doesn’t weight recent games more (unlike, for example
Torvik). &1
Last year’s UConn team (with its pronounced pre- and post- South Carolina metamorphosis) would be
undervalued by Massey (and NET) vs.
Torvik.
In the context of defense and offense to-date by this year’s team, Geno is on record as saying that defense is ahead of the (half-court offense) on a team that is
preliminarily comparable to the
better UConn teams.
&1 In addition, Torvik (unlike Massey)
makes granular adjustments to the weight of blowout games (both make adjustments for blowout scores).