PASE Values for NCAA Tournament Coaches, 2006-10

by James Bowman on Apr 7, 2010 8:45 PM EDT

More writing about PASE, or "performance above seed expectations". PASE is a number that indicates how many wins a coach in the NCAA tournament should perform above or below the expected number, given the manner in which the coach's team was seeded in the NCAA Tournament.

In order to build the spreadsheet, I calculated win expectations per tournament seed based on data from the 1991 to 2010 tournaments - tournaments where there have been 64 teams in the NCAA post-season performance. I then calculated seeds and wins for every coach in the tournament from 2006 to 2010.

Finally, I created a display. Only coaches that have gone to the NCAA post-season tournament three times or more during that time span are included in the display.

Clearly, this is an elite group of coaches. However, it's a large group: there are only 340 or so Division I women's teams, and yet the list is 47 names strong. It appears that the same group of coaches return to the tournament year after year. This definitely happens in the case of small school like Liberty or Marist that dominate their respective conferences.

The biggest surprise is that Geno Auriemma of Connecticut is not at the top of the list - he's second. The leader of the list is Sharon Versyp of Purdue.

Let's look at Purdue's run over the last five years:

2006: Versyp was coaching at Indiana at the time. She went to Purdue the next year.
2007: #2 seed. #2 seeds win an average of 2.63 games, Purdue won three.
2008: #9 seed. #9 seeds win an average of 0.63 games, Purdue won one.
2009: #6 seed: #6 seeds win an average of 1.03 games, Purdue won three.
2010: no appearance

The 2009 tourney appearance was the standout year. She started out with a win against Charlotte, and then found herself playing against #3 seeded North Carolina, beating them by 15 points. She followed that up with a win against #7 seeded Purdue that had upset Auburn, and took Purdue to the regional final against Oklahoma, coming with six points of the Sooners.

In past years, Pat Summitt of Tennessee would have dominated this list, but her last couple of appearances have been disappointing. Let's look at the last five years.

2006: #2 seed. #2 seeds win an average of 2.63 games, Tennessee won three.
2007: #1 seed. #1 seeds win an average of 3.73 games, Tennessee won six games and the championships.
2008: #1 seed. Same result as 2010 - seeded #1 and winning it all again, performing +2.27 above expectations.
2009: #5 seed. #5 seeds win an average of 1.11 games but Tennessee was upset by Ball State and left without a win.
2010: #1 seed. This time, Tennessee only won two games but was upset by Baylor in the regional semifinals.

Summitt ends up as the #10 coach in PASE over the last five years, between Agnus Berenato and Bill Fennelly. However, if you look at total wins over the last five years, Summit would be #3, behind Geno Auriemma and Tara VanDerVeer.

Now let's look at the bottom-performing coach - Jim Foster of Ohio State. You couldn't have gone wrong in predicting an earlier exit than usual for the Buckeyes, he has performed an average of -1.52 games below seed expectations.

2006: #1 seed. Made it past Oakland before losing to Boston College in the second round.
2007: #4 seed. Lost to #13 seed Marist in the opening round.
2008: #6 seed. Lost to #11 seed Florida State in the opening round.
2009: #3 seed. Picked up an opening round win against Sacred Heart. Then bumped into #11 Mississippi State which had upset Texas in the opening round. Ohio State won and then lost to Stanford by 18 points.
2010: #2 seed. Made it past St. Francis (PA). Faced Mississippi State again. This time, Ohio State lost by 20 points.

Below is the complete list, for your amusement: the formula is (Total Wins - Total Expected Wins)/(# of appearances).

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Comments

Very nice work, petrel

There are two questions I had, that I suppose I had before:

1) In Tennesee’s case (2010), they lost to a team that I think we can all agree just peaked at exactly the right time (or perhaps more accurately, Griner just kept improving). Would there be any way/reason to take account for losing to a team that was underseeded either due to selection committee error or peaking and simply playing better than their seed, as with Baylor?

2) Just curious, who did best in 2010?

I keep wanting to say that it looks like some coaches might end up being penalized for strong regular season performance in major conferences which earns them higher seeds and thus unfairly inflates expectations… but I suppose that’s what this accounts for — wins given the expectations coming in… that’s not really a question… a convoluted thought maybe.

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by Nate Parham on Apr 7, 2010 8:56 PM EDT reply actions

Some proposed answers....

1) The hope is that by accounting for a large enough span of years that the inequities balance out. It could very well be that Baylor was simply underseeded, but Baylor finished in the middle of the pack in the Big 12, at 9-7. My thought was that Baylor was overrated in general but boy, was I proven wrong. It seems that there were about six weeks in the regular season where Baylor had a tough time finding a win; the rest of the time they were very damned good.

It could also be that Baylor had an admirable strength of schedule. Here are Sagarin’s top ten strength of schedule over the season. Hopefully, the NCAA tourney doesn’t throw things too much out of balance:

1. Oklahoma
2. Texas A&M
3. Baylor
4. Tennesee
5. Texas
6. South Carolina
7. Connecticut
8. Stanford
9. Rutgers
10. Oklahoma State

2) Without calculating, it was probably Geno Auriemma with a +2.27 (after all, only one of the four #1 seeds can win it all), followed by Kim Mulkey, who took a #4 seed and got them to the Final Four. #4 seeds are expected to win 1.81 games; this gave her a +2.19 for the tournament.

Regarding your comment, the problem is that seeding isn’t an exact science. As proof, #9 seeds are expected to win more games (0.63 average) than #8 seeds (0.47 games average). #10 and #11 seeds do equally well. (0.36 games). It goes to show that once you get past the obvious favorites it becomes difficult to place teams. The only hope is that choosing a big enough time frame that biases for and against a team even out.

by James Bowman on Apr 7, 2010 9:26 PM EDT up reply actions