"Women’s College Basketball Is Better Than Men’s"

[JavaMan]

Last month, when my editor tasked me with looking into the stats surrounding the notorious Harvard-Stanford 16 vs. 1 upset from 1998 for ESPNW, I didn’t know much about women’s basketball. When I found that upsets are much less common in the NCAA women’s tournament than in the men’s, my mind jumped to what seemed like a logical explanation: Perhaps the lack of upsets is caused by a lack of depth in the women’s game.

In particular, teams like the epically dominant University of Connecticut Huskies — newly minted winners of their third straight national title and the 10th of Coach Geno Auriemma’s reign — must be able to win so much because they get all the best players from a shallow talent pool. Even many who love and defend women’s basketball often judge it a little differently than men’s, on the presumption that it’s a less mature sport.

I don’t begrudge anyone for thinking this — I would still think the same if I hadn’t had the game on my mind for the past seven weeks. (Have I mentioned my editor is patient?) And it would make sense if there were any truth to the notion that women’s basketball is less talented.

But it isn’t. As it turns out, not only is women’s college basketball as strong and deep in college-age talent as the men’s game, but for the rarest talent, it is significantly more so.


[LINK] to article titled: Women’s College Basketball Is Better Than Men’s

This article contains some extensive analysis, charting, linking, and graphing. Some interesting stuff.

 

[UcMiami]

GREAT ARTICLE!!!
Finally a really good analysis of what is happening in college basketball - both men and women - coming to the conclusion that I have always espoused - the reason for more madness in the men's tournament is the interplay between talent and experience - the teams with less talented/more mature four year starters are going to be more competitive with the KY one-and-done great recruiting teams.

 

[ChicagoGG]

Javaman - I have 2 things to say: 1) I always read your posts because you will always have something interesting in them; 2) I love 538.com. Not just the sports - their analyses are always top notch.

 

[DobbsRover2]

"Big upsets are extremely rare, and teams perform relatively closer to their expectations. But you don’t tune in to witness madness; you tune in to witness greatness."

------------------

Beautiful way to sum it up, with a quality that should be admired but which the trog sports writers always downplay as a bad thing.

Interesting numbers and way to evaluate the competition. Others might factor in some elements that could significantly affect the numbers, not necessarily between the two sports but between the teams within a sport. For instance, Gabby is used as the 5th UConn player because she had the 5th highest recruiting rating, however UConn's player with the 5th most minutes was Kia, who because she was Canadian was off the recruiting ratings radar for the HoopGurlz ones that Morris used. One player out of five can skew the numbers a bit especially for teams with a lot of international players who may not show up in HoopGurlz ratings. The difference between Gabby's 16th rating and what Kia would have gotten if she had been on the radar may not be really huge though.

Men's basketball talent suffers because it goes head to head with the big money sport football, which sucks away a sizable portion of the talent, but of course as Morris says the giant factor is that the average years on the college court for the top players is very small in comparison to the women's. And in Tournament play the fact that the men's games are all theoretically on a neutral court while the top women's teams have a significant number of games on their home courts is huge. That makes a gigantic difference in the number of upsets.

 

[2Husky]

Good article. I think it provides an interesting position on college basketball. Certainly that the best talent stays around for longer makes a huge impact. But I'm a bit skeptical of the methodology for assigning the percentiles of athletic talent. At the tail ends of the distribution there can be substantial variation year to year, just because there are so few players there. For example there is not a Lebron James every year but maybe every 5-10 years, there is someone that talented (not to say they will be as good for many other reasons), but it seems the methodology would rank him similar to the best players from each year. All the talk about the 'weak' senior class this year in WCBB seems to go along with that. Also the rankings themselves aren't necessarily correct which could impact which talent bucket a kid is placed in, I would expect somewhat systematic biases for that if the ratings need to prioritize certain skills above others when doing the ratings. I think it would interesting to see how sensitive the results are to particular ratings by looking at multiple services, or considering some small disruptions to the current ratings list (essentially assigning an error to each rating and randomizing the error to see how the list changes). The other thing I think would be good to consider is the position of the players, and distribution of ratings by position.

 

[j66kicker]

Great alternate explanations for lack of parity in WCBB, rather than "small talent pool."

 

[Tidepool]

If you look at the very end of the linked article you will see a link to another article that should warm the hearts of all of the Boneyard's UConn fans ... its title tells the story: "The Huskies Are Better than the Wildcats Ever Hoped To Be"

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-huskies-are-better-than-the-wildcats-ever-hoped-to-be/

(I'm sure someone will gently let me know if this link was posted previously.)

 

[j66kicker]

If you look at the very end of the linked article you will see a link to another article that should warm the hearts of all of the Boneyard's UConn fans ... its title tells the story: "The Huskies Are Better than the Wildcats Ever Hoped To Be"

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-huskies-are-better-than-the-wildcats-ever-hoped-to-be/

(I'm sure someone will gently let me know if this link was posted previously.)

I think it was posted a while back, but it was nice to read again, that "UConn has — by far — the best offense in the country, as well as — by far — the best defense in the country."

 

[Kmoney]

Wow Kicker....what a great chart. That sums up last season perfectly. You guys are #1 in charts too.

 

[UcMiami]

Good article. I think it provides an interesting position on college basketball. Certainly that the best talent stays around for longer makes a huge impact. But I'm a bit skeptical of the methodology for assigning the percentiles of athletic talent. At the tail ends of the distribution there can be substantial variation year to year, just because there are so few players there. For example there is not a Lebron James every year but maybe every 5-10 years, there is someone that talented (not to say they will be as good for many other reasons), but it seems the methodology would rank him similar to the best players from each year. All the talk about the 'weak' senior class this year in WCBB seems to go along with that. Also the rankings themselves aren't necessarily correct which could impact which talent bucket a kid is placed in, I would expect somewhat systematic biases for that if the ratings need to prioritize certain skills above others when doing the ratings. I think it would interesting to see how sensitive the results are to particular ratings by looking at multiple services, or considering some small disruptions to the current ratings list (essentially assigning an error to each rating and randomizing the error to see how the list changes). The other thing I think would be good to consider is the position of the players, and distribution of ratings by position.

You have to start somewhere with a 'non-subjective' (to the analysis) set of data points. You could choose another service, choose the analysis we get here the averages all services, etc. But the reality is you are still dealing with subjective ranking of players. DT turned out to be an exceptional college player, but she wasn't the consensus #1 in HS nor unanimous as NPOY (I think I have that right.) Reality and college performance are never going to be reflected exactly in any ranking.

I think what would be more telling would be to look at a trend of these numbers over time - so what was the picture for 2013, and 2012, and 2011, etc.

I think it would also be especially interesting to look at the picture in the men's game before and after the lawsuit that freed up college players jumping to the NBA whenever they wanted. If you looked at the men's picture the year before that reality, and then say five years later when the one-and-done had become an established pattern, I suspect you would see much less madness in the earlier situation.

 

[JavaMan]

If you look at the very end of the linked article you will see a link to another article that should warm the hearts of all of the Boneyard's UConn fans ... its title tells the story: "The Huskies Are Better than the Wildcats Ever Hoped To Be"

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-huskies-are-better-than-the-wildcats-ever-hoped-to-be/

(I'm sure someone will gently let me know if this link was posted previously.)

Your link worked for me. The article is also linked in the original post under the words "epically dominant" in blue type.

 

[ed4ourgirls]

UConn's position in the above posted chart is indeed impressive, but I think
we have to admit that part of that exceptionalism is due to UConn playing
so many of their games against weak conference teams.

This year's championship team set a new season record for MOV by a substantial
margin not only against other teams this year but also against all past UConn
championship teams as well.

Is this year's championship team really significantly better than all previous
championship teams? I think few UConn fans, if any, would make that claim.

 

[UConnCat]

Average UConn Margin of Victory since 2000-2001:

'00-'01: 31.8
'01-'02: 35.4*
'02-'03: 21.3*
'03-'04: 21.7*
'04-'05: 19.2
'05-'06: 17.2
'06-'07: 22.0
'07-'08: 28.9
'08-'09: 30.5*
'09-'10: 34.9*
'10-'11: 26.5
'11-'12: 29.4
'12-'13: 32.7*
'13-'14: 34.3*
'14-'15: 40.7*

*National Champions

 

[UcMiami]

UConn's position in the above posted chart is indeed impressive, but I think
we have to admit that part of that exceptionalism is due to UConn playing
so many of their games against weak conference teams.

This year's championship team set a new season record for MOV by a substantial
margin not only against other teams this year but also against all past UConn
championship teams as well.

Is this year's championship team really significantly better than all previous
championship teams? I think few UConn fans, if any, would make that claim.

The actual article gives a three year version of that chart as well and Uconn has trended further and further away from the pack in the last three years, but all three data points are well away from any other program. 3 years ago was the full roster of the old big east with a Louisville/Uconn final, two years ago Louisville and Rutgers were still in conference and the OOC was very solid. In addition, the MOV is generally more to do with the bench play and not the starters. This past year, the bench was able to maintain or in some cases extend leads - in some other years a 40 point lead half way through the 2nd half would settle into a 25 point MOV because the bench got burned.

 

[UcMiami]

UConn's position in the above posted chart is indeed impressive, but I think
we have to admit that part of that exceptionalism is due to UConn playing
so many of their games against weak conference teams.

This year's championship team set a new season record for MOV by a substantial
margin not only against other teams this year but also against all past UConn
championship teams as well.

Is this year's championship team really significantly better than all previous
championship teams? I think few UConn fans, if any, would make that claim.

As a follow up to the MOV answer I gave - if you look at the other indicators of dominance - points allowed, shooting percentage defense - this team did not set records. Nor did they set a record for most points. They were good on all fronts, but other very good teams still own those records.

 

[Gus Mahler]

Your link worked for me. The article is also linked in the original post under the words "epically dominant" in blue type.

Now that's dominant!

 

[wes33]

Looks a lot better also. http://www.goduke.com/SportSelect.dbml?DB_LANG=C&DB_OEM_ID=4200&KEY=&SPID=1846&SPSID=22760

 

[Striper69]

I think it's far more interesting to watch over a season as long as "into" it. I had a grand time this past season going to Delaware games as a season ticket holder. Maybe they didn't loom as a NC Champion contender but every game was interesting to watch.

 

[NickyNewark]

Last month, when my editor tasked me with looking into the stats surrounding the notorious Harvard-Stanford 16 vs. 1 upset from 1998 for ESPNW, I didn’t know much about women’s basketball. When I found that upsets are much less common in the NCAA women’s tournament than in the men’s, my mind jumped to what seemed like a logical explanation: Perhaps the lack of upsets is caused by a lack of depth in the women’s game.

In particular, teams like the epically dominant University of Connecticut Huskies — newly minted winners of their third straight national title and the 10th of Coach Geno Auriemma’s reign — must be able to win so much because they get all the best players from a shallow talent pool. Even many who love and defend women’s basketball often judge it a little differently than men’s, on the presumption that it’s a less mature sport.

I don’t begrudge anyone for thinking this — I would still think the same if I hadn’t had the game on my mind for the past seven weeks. (Have I mentioned my editor is patient?) And it would make sense if there were any truth to the notion that women’s basketball is less talented.

But it isn’t. As it turns out, not only is women’s college basketball as strong and deep in college-age talent as the men’s game, but for the rarest talent, it is significantly more so.


[LINK] to article titled: Women’s College Basketball Is Better Than Men’s

This article contains some extensive analysis, charting, linking, and graphing. Some interesting stuff.

I agree...I enjoy the purity of WBB and find MBB increasingly boring. After FB i look forward to the WBB season and have for twenty yrs at least. I don't know why some think of it as a niche sport !?! Outside FB it is THE sport!