Contributing to SportsIllustrated.com: Charts for Luke Winn's Final Four preview.

Instead of writing a post this week for Luke Winn's Tourney Blog, I contributed some charts to his massive final Four preview. Click through to the Final Four Intel Report to find what categories the Final Four teams under-and over-performed in during the NCAA tournament, relative to their established rest-of-season levels:

For SportsIllustrated.com: Sweet 16 Matchup Issues

My latest is over at Luke Winn’s SI Tourney Blog. In it, I use adjusted efficiency data from Ken Pomeroy and adjusted box score data from TeamRankings.com’s possession-based college basketball game simulations to spotlight a few remaining teams that have matchup issues on defense. Summary: FSU should do great against VCU, Duke doesn’t want to see Kansas in the final, and Ohio State’s defense may be slightly overrated.

Catching up on links

I’ve been delinquent this week in posting links to my articles elsewhere, so here’s a catch up.

On Monday, I had a piece at SI on Luke Winn’s Tourney Blog that I’m rather proud of: a summary of all my defensive charting efforts this year. If you read only one thing I’ve written all year, I hope it’s that.

Tuesday on NBC Sports, I took a look at whether this year’s tournament was expected to be more or less crazy than usual. The verdict was that the first round probably wouldn’t feature any more upsets than usual, but the later rounds should be wide open.

Though I’m not mentioned by name, I wrote the blurbs for the Southeast region for this Tuesday picks post on Chad Millman’s Blog. The NCAA bracket picks themselves were straight from the TeamRankings.com mainframe.

And of course, I’ve had lots of posts over at TeamRankings.com. One nice one from this week examines how much a healthy Kyrie Irving was worth to Duke at the start of this year (which is a different question from how much he’ll be worth in his return, due to issues with his game condition, and amount of practice with the team).

Finally, my “official” bracket is up over at NBC Sports. Full disclosure: I didn’t actually enter this one in any of my pools, but it’s a fairly close copy of my ideal bracket. That said, I have zero confidence in my picks this year. I may or may not do better than these guys:

Please Donate To Japan Disaster Relief

Jonathan Foster of From The Barn prompted this post. I hope he doesn’t mind, but I’m going to just reprint his plea to support the Japan relief efforts below:

Hello fellow college basketball bloggers,

By now I am sure you are acutely aware of the disaster unfolding throughout Japan. After a massive earthquake, one of the five strongest in recorded history and a subsequent tsunami, there is indescribable devastation. An estimated 10,000 died, thousands more are injured, millions are homeless and a struggling with access to basic needs like food shelter and water, and hundreds of thousands of others have been evacuated from their homes due to the threat of nuclear meltdowns at several power plants throughout the northeast of the country. It is a horrific situation.

Meanwhile, on our side of the Pacific Ocean, we are gearing up for out favorite time of year, the NCAA tournament. Over the next few days and weeks, many of our websites will see the most traffic we see all season. Please consider using this increased traffic to help the people of Japan, and place either a new post asking your readers to donate, or consider adding a link your various open threads, live blogs, game previews, or we got snubbed rants that you'll be posting between now Thursday.

The people of Japan face a monumental effort in rebuilding their country and their lives, and the least we can all do is throw a few links and few dollars their way. Every little bit helps.

For those willing to encourage their readers to help the cause, I'd suggest links to the American Red Cross dedicated Japan Relief Fund, or donating directly to the Japanese Red Cross, made extra easy by the fine folks at google.

Thanks for reading this, and please considering making a donation and making it easy for your readers to donate too.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Foster

Writer and Owner of From The Barn, A Golden Gophers Basketball Blog

This was a classy idea on Jon’s part, and I hope many of you will contribute.

Defensive Score Sheet: Colorado vs. Kansas

For background on what’s going on here, see my first Project Defensive Score Sheet post.

Here’s the table; notes are after the break.

Defensive Score Sheet: Oklahoma State vs. Kansas

I’m back, baby!

OK, so I still have quite a backlog to get through, but I’ve already done the actual charting on a couple of them, and just need to do data entry and formatting. And Saturday looks to be a marathon charting day for the rest.

Here’s the chart for Thursday’s game:

For NBCSports.com: Do Conference Tourneys Matter?

Posted today over at the Peacock: my article that looks at NCAA tournament performance over the past 13 years to determine whether winning your conference tournament is a good thing (higher seed!), a bad thing (tired legs!), or a wash.