KenPom 'tiers' and Michigan's schedule

Michigan Basketball
1

KenPom updated his schedule pages to show tier A games and tier B games.

Explanation here:

http://kenpom.com/blog/index.php/weblog/entry/tiers_of_joy

Basically, top 50 or top 100 games adjusted for home/neutral/way.

Michigan is 3-4 in top-50 (tier A games) and 1-0 in top-100 (tier B games). Still 8 tier A games and 1 tier B game left on the schedule.

2

Interesting that playing the 57th team on a neutral site is a tier B game while playing the 96th time at home is a tier A game, especially in light of this quote from the blog entry: “It turns out those adjustments are important. Beating the 90th-ranked team on the road is about as difficult as beating the 50th-best team on a neutral floor…” Both games must be right on the edge of A-B tiers.

3

The game against Illinois was at Illinois.

Neutral site games aren’t adjusted up or down I believe.

4

Oops, right, away for Illinois, which was really my point - it almost aligns perfectly with his example (50th/57th neutral vs. 90th/96th road), so that suggests the cutoff for tiers A and B is right around there, right?

5

Tier A is a top 50 game. Tier B is top 100, Adjusted for homecourt.

6

Dylan am I wrong to think Nebraska could give Michigan problems next week on the road? They aren’t a terrific team by any means and yes it’s early but their offense has really been humming in conference play. Playing Rutgers/Minnesota will do that but every team with the exception of Iowa has played a bad team thus far.

7

Don’t think it’ll be an easy game. They are tough at home and have a good offense. Hard to get a great read on them though because they have played what seems like a weak Big Ten schedule.

8

I wish we would stop scheduling these terrible teams like Delaware State, Bryant and Houston Baptist, that are worse than 200 in KenPom. I don’t like that our SOS gets dragged down so much. Lets go back to scheduling some more of the local schools that at least usually reside between 150 200 on KenPom: Eastern/Western/Central Michigan, Toledo, Detroit, Depaul, Ball State, Milwaukee, Miami Ohio, Cleveland State.