As of today, that’s how long it has been since North Carolina hired Bill Belichick as its head football coach on December 11, 2024.

A lot has happened over those 600-plus days, and much of it has come off the field. A planned series with HBO’s Hard Knocks fell through, Hulu later announced and canceled a docuseries around the program, Belichick released a book and gave an awkward interview, and there have been lots of staff changes.

When Carolina opens the 2026 season in Ireland against TCU on Saturday, it will be the program’s 13th game day with Belichick on the sideline. The 13 game days amount to just over two percent of Belichick’s total time on the job.

The anticipation around the program is different today from a year ago. There is less excitement, more curiosity, and maybe even some relief and dread mixed in.

The shape of Carolina’s schedule gives space for the off-field events and negativity to continue.

UNC is scheduled to play the earliest FBS game of the 2026 season when it faces TCU in Ireland on Saturday. Carolina will not play again for another 14 days, when it hosts FCS opponent East Tennessee State on September 12. The Tar Heels then play only one more game in September, a September 19 trip to Clemson.

UNC is one of nine FBS teams that will not play its fourth game until October. The difference is that the other eight teams (Air Force, Arizona State, Army, BYU, Kansas, Louisiana Tech, Navy, and Syracuse) do not play a Week 0 game this weekend.

35 days.

That is the span from Carolina’s opener against TCU to its fourth game, when it hosts Notre Dame on October 3. It is the largest gap between game one and game four among all 138 FBS teams this season. Stanford is next at 29 days, and several teams follow at 28 days.

If we exclude the wonky scheduling of the 2020 season, Carolina’s 35-day stretch between game one and game four is tied for the third-longest among FBS team-seasons since 2014. Only 2017 UCF (38 days) and 2017 Georgia State (37 days) had longer gaps.

Here is a look at the program’s first two calendar years under Belichick, beginning January 1, 2025, with game days and selected off-field events.

A calendar does not tell you what fans think or feel, but it may help explain why so much attention has shifted from the football itself to what surrounds the program. The number of FOIA requests submitted by Belichick’s significant other matches Carolina’s total wins on the field in 2025.

The schedule over the next five weeks is ripe for the off-field noise to only get louder. An early game against TCU, a week with no game, a home game against an FCS opponent, a trip to Clemson, another week with no game, and a home date with Notre Dame. Clemson is a place UNC has not won since 2001, and Notre Dame enters the season as a national-title contender.

A win against TCU could shift attention back toward the field and give the program some positive news before a week off and its home opener. A loss would leave more time for criticism and speculation before the next game, and with tough tests looming against Clemson and Notre Dame.

35 days. That’s longer than General Manager Michael Lombardi has been on administrative leave (31 days as of today) and Defensive Coordinator Steve Belichick has been on medical leave (21 days).

The next 35 days might not settle the Belichick era, but they may establish whether the story on the field can finally surpass the story off the field.

Now for something completely different

I built a tiny app to surface Carolina’s athletic schedule. If you’re a UNC fan, this is for you, and if you’re not, feel free to skip ahead.

The prototype is live at whenuncplays.com

It’s a list of every UNC athletic event across all sports for the 2026-27 calendar. It includes upcoming games and past results, and you can filter by sport and location. No charts, no rosters, no box scores, no ads, no previous year’s information.

I built it because goheels.com, tied to SIDEARM Sports, has to solve lots of other problems like ad revenue, ways to sell/buy tickets, images, long-form analysis, etc.

It’s way too hard to answer the “when do they play” question. For example, the current All-Sport Schedule has filters that include Academics, Compliance, and other non-sport options. The text-only schedule is better, but it’s static.

This site just brings you the dadgum schedule.

Please keep in mind not every sport is covered yet, just what’s surfaced so far for 2026-27 athletic year. I’ll be using it myself as more sports are getting started. Please let me know if you have ideas to improve it.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading this far, and if you’re looking for a complete Week 0 schedule, check out cfbtxt.com

A few recommendations:

• Six Zone Duo: a new podcast about women’s volleyball from the same Split Zone Duo outfit. It’s not common for a college football podcast to bring you coverage from an underserved sport, and this was a pleasant surprise. If you’re looking for volleyball analytics, check out evollve.net too.

• The model is man-made: blog post about AI last week from Benn Stancil. This hit home for me in a lot of ways. The different ways you can define a “user” reminds me of some advanced stats that we all try to track across sports. Also, I learned that Google bought all of Spirit Airlines’ data to help train its AI.

• Imagination Library: the passing of Dolly Parton reminded me of one of the best examples of public good that I’ve seen in my lifetime. With two kids under five years old, both children get books delivered straight to our house from Dolly’s Imagination Library. It was dead-simple to register. We did so at the hospital right after both children were born. If funding is being cut for the project by certain states, it’s a good time to make a donation.

The AP poll is no different.

Sixty-nine voters submit ballots ranking teams 1 through 25. There is a point system that tallies the votes and ranks each team in order.

A team receives 25 points for a first-place vote, 24 points for a second-place vote, and all the way down to 1 point for a 25th-place vote. We can use these points to determine each team’s share of the possible points and get a sense of the distance between teams across all the voters.

The chart below computes the total percentage of possible points for all teams, including the 25 additional teams outside the Top 25 that received votes.

There is a clear separation between the top seven and the rest of the poll: Ohio State, Oregon, Georgia, Notre Dame, Texas, Indiana, and Miami. Each received roughly 80 percent or more of the possible points, with Ohio State and Oregon both exceeding 90 percent.

The middle of the poll is grouped closer together. For example, the 11th-ranked team (LSU) received five more points than 12th-ranked (Texas Tech). BYU and USC both received 839 points sharing an identical ranking at number 14.

The cutoff at the bottom of the Top 25 is much more of a toss-up. It’s the first time since 2011 that Clemson is unranked in the preseason poll, but the Tigers received only five fewer points than 25th-ranked Missouri.

If you’re interested in tracking the individual ballots of the AP poll, check out bakonyalgo.com/ap to see a list of rankings by each voter. You can see previous polls and more information over at r/CFB.

Whether you believe the preseason poll is predictive is your prerogative. Some coaches don’t believe preseason ratings of any kind matter much, and some media members think preseason polls are junk food.

In other sports, like college basketball, statistical savant Ken Pomeroy has long shared an appreciation for the preseason poll. Once the season begins, though, Pomeroy doesn’t put much stock in the AP poll.

Whatever you believe, ordinal rankings are easy to understand, but each team’s share of the possible points provides useful context too.

That’s it for this week, short and sweet.

A few recommendations as the preseason winds down:

• FEI Game Efficiencies: Just when you think Brian Fremeau’s site, bcftoys.com, can’t get any more useful, he added Game Efficiencies. Brian explains the possession efficiencies here, but the gist is you can get an idea of how efficiently a team used its drives based on net points, available yards, and net yards per play. It’s fascinating to see whether a team outperformed historical percentages and managed to win a game while not being all that efficient with its possessions. The North Carolina section from last year is alarming!

• Enshittification: I’ve started reading Cory Doctorow’s book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. It’s depressing and interesting at the same time, and after reading it, you start to see enshittification everywhere.

• NBA Gestalt: a fresh idea from Evan Zamir for showing the relationship among five-man lineups across the NBA. The Lineup Lab is fun to explore.

🤟 College football kicks off next week, check out cfbtxt.com 🤟

The talking season with all the Power 4 media days is coming to an end and it’s been an adventure. The Big Ten doesn’t cry a river, whine, or complain. SEC coaches aren’t thrilled with a 9-game conference schedule. The ACC is redefining the meaning of a tie and the Big 12 is sponsored by Monster Energy.

It’s high time to make predictions and project win totals. A lot of hypotheticals, but we can start to plot out the shape of the upcoming season.

Here is a list of every 2026 game featuring at least one FBS team, broken out by week of the season and type of game. The chart surfaces non-conference games between Power 4 leagues (plus Notre Dame), FBS vs FCS games, and the total number of conference games by each league.

Week 5 or the start of October is when the season heats up. There are 50 conference games in Week 5 and it only continues from there. A lot of narratives will be shaped for the playoff over the first month or so of the season. From October through the rest of the season, around nine of every 10 games will be in league play.

There are 127 games between FBS and FCS teams. And 103 of those games are played in the first three weeks of the season. The strength of the calendar and the schedule aren’t the same thing.

All four power leagues are playing nine conference games, except the five ACC teams still playing eight. Those leagues are bloated, and the schedules within the leagues can be wildly different.

The new Pac-12, which only features eight teams1, has a fun scheduling quirk in Week 13. Each team plays every other team in the league once, and in the final week of November, the league will flex opponents for one final game with favorable matchups for the playoff committee. These games are designated as non-conference games.

If you’re interested in more schedule updates, you can find updated data over at cfbtxt.com/schedule

cfbtxt.com updates

Ahead of the season, you can now find updates including:

• average preseason percentile ratings across FEI, SP+, and FPI

• data from previous seasons dating all the way back to 2014

• team pages show records since 2014, over the past three seasons, and all-time playoff appearances too

You can download the preseason ratings across those three systems here: https://cfbtxt.com/data/ratings_preseason_2026.csv

It’s fascinating to see which teams diverge in the preseason ratings with these three systems. Here is a look at 10 teams that have the widest disagreement.

A good chunk of new coaching staffs associated with these teams. It’s clear FEI values different things preseason than say ESPN’s FPI, and Brian Fremeau was kind enough to share that process on this newsletter a year ago.

North Carolina’s shenanigans off the field continue this week. Both SP+ and FPI rate the Tar Heels higher than I would guess. For me, it’s hard to get past the end of last season as UNC lost to all three of its in-state rivals (Wake Forest, Duke, and NC State) for the first time since 1989 and did so by a combined 46 points!

That’s it for this week.

If you spot an error over at cfbtxt.com or have an idea for other data to surface, please let me know.

A few nerdy recommendations this week:

• gtUtils package: Andrew Weatherman made a big update to the package this week, and this package continues to make it easier and easier to make great looking tables.

• Vladislav Shufinsky’s post on Numbers in sports on how to match player names across tons of data sources for soccer analytics was super useful.

• Joey Votto episode on The Jim Day podcast: Votto is one of the more interesting athletes I can remember, fun listen as he gets into sports broadcasting.

Fans are trying to split the G ahead of the big game. College GameDay is trying to sell us on season two of Bill Belichick and hyping up TCU quarterback Jaden Craig.

In seven weeks, the start of college football will be here. North Carolina meets TCU in Dublin, Ireland on August 29 to kickoff the season.

While many fans hope Belichick turns in an Irish goodbye, the TCU and Carolina contest is the first of 29 non-conference games between power conference teams (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, and SEC).

Because those four leagues have a total of 67 teams now and most leagues are playing nine conference games, these cross-conference matchups are starting to decline. For example, there were 33 cross-conference games during the 2024 regular season.

From week four through week 12 of the regular season, there are no games scheduled between teams of these four power leagues. That’s the mid-September to the end of November.

Here is a list of all 29 games by week of the season. Four of the 29 games are at neutral sites.

This excludes independents like Notre Dame. The Irish do play 10 games against teams from these power conferences: ACC (6), Big Ten (3), Big 12 (1), and SEC (0).

Notre Dame’s schedule is favorable, especially if you believe in CJ Carr as much as Todd McShay. The margin of error might be slimmer than it was a season ago, when the Irish missed the College Football Playoff with a 10-2 record.

The bloated power conferences mean fewer cross-conference games and more league games, but also lots of missed connections given the regular season is only 12 total games.

Missed Connections

Let’s take a look at the missed connections across these four leagues or the teams that are in the same conference, but not scheduled to play this regular season.

The ACC has 17 total teams and five of those teams are scheduled to play only eight league games, while the other 12 are scheduled to play nine conference games.

For a league that already had shaky tie-breakers, an unbalanced schedule, with teams not even playing the same number of league games, is an interesting choice.

The 18 teams in the Big Ten all play nine conference games.

Five of these teams (Indiana, Nebraska, Penn State, Washington, and USC) are not scheduled to play a non-conference game against a power conference opponent or Notre Dame this season.

At least Washington still plays old Pac-12 rival Washington State. Nebraska playing Ohio, Bowling Green, and North Dakota in the non-conference leaves a lot to be desired.

The 16 teams in the Big 12 all play nine league games too.

Four of the 16 teams (Arizona, Houston, Kansas State, and Texas Tech) are not scheduled to play a non-conference game against a power conference opponent or Notre Dame this season either.

Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire is trying to schedule Texas to keep that rivalry going, though it doesn’t seem likely. While the Pac-12 is not considered a power conference in 2026, Arizona and Kansas State are both scheduled to play Washington State. And Houston will play Oregon State this season too.

There are 16 teams in the SEC and all 16 teams are scheduled to play nine conference games.

Texas missing both Alabama and Georgia feels notable, especially considering 12 of the league’s 16 teams are in the top 25 of ESPN’s FPI ratings released this week.

It’s not hard to imagine the debate of a 9-3 SEC team against a 10-2 Notre Dame team because we’ll know it just means more.

At least the games will be here in seven weeks. The offseason in college sports is littered with government news and lawsuits.

Just take a look at these graphics from On3 over the Brendan Sorsby saga.

It will be refreshing when we can actually talk about ball.

That’s it for this week, and thanks for reading this far.

I’ve updated - cfbtxt.com - with the 2026 schedule and added past season results all the way back to 2014, the start of the playoff era. I’m slowly working to surface more data, so please let me know if anything looks askew.

A few recommendations for this week across multiple sports:

• VSIN college football betting podcast: firehouse of information with guest Parker Fleming this week. Appreciated Parker’s Guns N' Roses analogy for Deion Sanders and Colorado.

• JSuttHoops on the NBA offseason: Jacob Sutton breaking down some of the Summer League and offseason storylines with more free agency news on its way.

• dtwbaseball.com: answers the question, did this MLB team deserve to win? A really nifty site built by Derek Grifka.

• MLB Draft Analytics: built by Robert Frey, the draft is this weekend, and this site does a great job with predictions and surfacing the different money at each draft slot.

🤟 Stay cool 🤟

The building blocks of efficiency help explain why. On average, teams are turning over the ball less and rebounding their own missed shots more. Combined with an uptick in effective field goal percentage, teams are attempting more shots and making them at a higher rate.

But the largest rise in any of the four factors has been the free throw rate. The average D-I free throw rate was 31.5 in the 2022-23 season and it jumped to 35.0 this past season.

Back in December, we wrote about the rise in free throw rates and tried to explain what was causing the surge. The NCAA is taking notice too.

In early May, the Division I Men's Basketball Rules Subcommittee officially discussed moving from halves to quarters during virtual meetings. No rule change was approved, but the NCAA cited "positive momentum" to make the switch. The reasons cited included pace of play, team foul resets, overall game length, fan engagement, and broadcast structure.

As John Gasaway pointed out, the last time a men's college basketball game was played in quarters was in 1954. The switch to halves came almost accidentally, through a shot clock proposal that Howard Hobson brought to that year's Final Four in Kansas City. What he got instead was two halves, as the late Dan McQuade documented in the Defector four years ago.

The NCAA first introduced a 45-second shot clock 40 years ago. It moved to 35 seconds before the 1993-94 season, and to 30 seconds before the 2015-16 campaign.

Yet, here we are still playing two halves in men’s college hoops.

So, how do free throws impact pace of play?

Let’s try to think of free throws as compound interest.

A team’s fouls, one through six, are the principal. There is no penalty unless it is a shooting foul. A hand-check or push-off does not put a team in the penalty.

As a team picks up its seventh, eighth, and ninth foul, it sends the opponent to the line for a one-and-one. This is the interest, and the second shot is only earned if the first free throw attempt is made.

Once a team picks up its 10th foul, it has reached compound interest. Every personal foul from that point forward results in two automatic free throws for the opponent. With only two halves and no reset until the half ends, a team can stay in that penalty for a good amount of game time.

Every time a team is at the free throw line, the clock stops. This elongates the game.

Game duration is something the NCAA does not surface or make easily available to the public. Any college basketball fan has experienced the purgatory of trying to switch apps to find their team's game because the previous broadcast is running over. The ESPN to ESPN+ transition is not exactly rewinding a VHS tape, but it’s an annoying part of being a fan.

Anyhow, it’s obvious that more foul shots don’t make the games any shorter.

How often are teams actually in the bonus though?

This past season, at least one team reached the bonus in 97 percent of second halves. Across 76 percent of second halves, at least one team reached the double bonus. This is up from the 2022-23 season when 73 percent of second halves featured at least one team in the double bonus.

The first half tells a different story. Only about 30 percent of first halves featured at least one team in the double bonus during the 2025-26 season. Of course, teams do foul intentionally late in the game to stop the clock, which contributes to a higher rate of the penalty in the second half and at the end of games.

An extreme example came earlier this year when Vanderbilt beat Alabama 96-90 in a game that lasted two hours and 43 minutes with 88 combined free throws. The chart below shows the total time each team spent in the bonus or double bonus.

Both teams were in the double bonus for the last 10 minutes of game time. The officiating crew of Don Daily, Bart Lenox, and Brian Dorsey whistled a combined 64 fouls in the game. Vanderbilt attempted 28 shots in the second half to 33 free throws.

While this is an extreme example, it shows that the increase in free throw rates is only contributing to longer and longer games.

So, what changed this past season?

Part of the acceleration in free throw rates was a specific rule change. The NCAA implemented the continuation rule ahead of this past season. The continuation rule expanded what legally qualifies as a shooting foul. This past season saw nearly 16 shooting fouls per game on average, up from 14.9 shooting fouls per game in the 2024-25 season.

Pomeroy’s tempo numbers over the past four seasons are relatively stable at around 68 possessions per game. The game is not being played faster on average. There are more possessions that result in foul shots though.

This brings us to the one-and-one

While men’s college basketball is one of the only organized leagues that plays two halves, it does bring one unique element to the game. The one-and-one adds genuine drama and a wrinkle not found in many other forms of organized basketball.

During the second round of the 2024 NCAA Tournament, Creighton’s Ryan Kalkbrenner fouled Oregon’s N’Faly Dante with 26 seconds remaining in regulation. Oregon led 62-60. The foul meant a one-and-one situation for Oregon.

Dante missed the first free throw. Creighton rebounded. Baylor Scheierman hit a mid-range jumper with eight seconds left to knot the score at 62. Oregon missed a shot at the buzzer of regulation, and Creighton went on to win the game 86-73 in double-overtime, ending Oregon’s season.

The one-and-one is a game situation that is built into halves, and a move to quarters would likely eliminate that situation.

Is that a good thing?

Women’s college basketball eliminated it entirely when it moved to quarters before the 2015-16 season. A team moves straight to a two-shot bonus after the opponent commits its fifth foul of the quarter.

Why couldn’t the men move to quarters and make fouls five, six, or even seven award the opponent with a one-and-one chance? Any foul after that would result in two foul shots.

Instead of the one-and-one, what if the game moved to quarters and used a shorter shot clock of 24 seconds instead of 30 seconds?

If it’s not obvious that more free throws slow the game down, check the NBA’s radical rule for the 2026 Summer League. The rule states:

Any foul that would typically result in one, two or three free throws under standard NBA rules will instead result in a single free throw attempt. That attempt will be worth the same total number of points as the free throws it replaces.

Standard NBA free throw rules will apply during the last two minutes of the fourth quarter and throughout overtime.

Maybe the one-and-one is not necessary either. After all, Victor Wembanyama missed two free throws with less than two minutes to go in Game Four of the NBA Finals. The Knicks went on to complete a miraculous comeback and later defeat the Spurs in Game Five to win the NBA title.

Quarters would change the game flow

Quarters wouldn’t necessarily fix the trend in more shooting fouls. The continuation rule is doing that today, and overall, that feels like a welcome change to the game.

What quarters would change is the compounding interest that slows the pace of play. If the foul counts reset every ten minutes instead of every twenty, the game should move a bit faster.

Yes, you need to figure out the media timeouts and the one-and-one rule. The NCAA already did that with the women’s game, so there is a proof of concept. Even FIFA introduced “quarters” in the form of hydration breaks in the 2026 World Cup. The clock doesn’t stop, but the structured breaks are paying off.

Let’s remember that television runs the sport.

Those executives want games that finish on time and run on schedule. When broadcasts are consistent, they are easier to manage and easier to sell. That’s why it feels like the move towards quarters will happen sooner rather than later.

It’s time to reset the ledger more often and reduce the compound interest.

That’s it for this week, thanks for reading this far.

A big thank you to Connor (cobrastats) for his help in fetching the play-by-play over the past several seasons.

🤟 Enjoy the summer and the World Cup (what is offsides anyway?) 🤟

Baseball is a tricky sport to determine the best team. As Oklahoma’s head coach, Skip Johnson, shared earlier this week:

Do you really ever win at baseball?

Years ago, a paper was published that studied randomness in sports and how often the best team wins across different pro sports. It’s a concept I routinely return to around this time of year, right as the NBA and NHL are wrapping up their seasons.

Michael Lopez, Greg Matthews, and Ben Baumer compared the NBA, MLB, NFL, and NHL. The paper found that in the NBA in a seven-game series, the better team won about 80 percent of the time. It’s much different though for other pro leagues.

In order to match the NBA’s better team advances rate of 80 percent of the time, it would require:

• a best-of-11 series in the NFL

• a best-of-51 series in the NHL

• a best-of-75 series in MLB

Think about that.

A 75-game series because the margin between outs can be that thin.

College baseball’s NCAA Tournament format is different from pro baseball. A team needs to win at least three games to advance out of the Regional, two games to win a Super Regional, and at least five games to win the College World Series.

You can’t win a National Championship without performing in the month of June. Both North Carolina and Oklahoma are proof.

Carolina’s steady pitching and hot bat

We’ve covered that Carolina’s strength is pitching and defense over the past couple of weeks. UNC has turned 60 double plays in 66 total games this season and its 0.983 fielding percentage is one of the best in the country.

Carolina’s pitching staff, especially its starters, was not all that efficient entering the NCAA Tournament. For example, Jason DeCaro and Ryan Lynch combined for only 7.1 innings pitched in two starts in the ACC Tournament.

The staff has been much better in the NCAA Tournament. The emergence of freshman left-hander Jackson Rose has strengthened the staff. Rose has thrown 12 innings in the NCAA Tournament and allowed zero runs on just three hits.

Take a look at the pitches per out for Carolina’s five primary arms by month of the season. In the months of April and May, none of these five pitchers averaged fewer than five pitches per out. Three of these five pitchers have done that in the month of June.

The efficiency on the mound has allowed Carolina to maintain an advantage and avoid taxing its staff. Here is a look at the entire pitching log for Carolina’s nine NCAA Tournament games so far.

The staff’s improved efficiency paired with timely hitting means Carolina has lost just once in the NCAA Tournament. UNC has seven players with 48 or more RBI. Owen Hull leads the team with 85 RBI. Hull leads Carolina’s offense in multiple categories, and he has been red hot in the month of June.

Here is a look at Hull’s offense by month of the season.

Hull has seven more hits in the month of June in nine fewer at-bats than he had in the month of February. The junior has gotten on base around 64 percent of the time over the six games in June. He is slugging over 1.000 with eight extra-base hits.

If Carolina wins the National Title Monday, it’s going to need Hull and its pitching staff to continue the June performances.

Sooners’ offense is booming

Oklahoma has hit 26 of its 91 home runs this season in the NCAA Tournament. The Sooners have homered in all 10 NCAA Tournament games.

Bradley Smart, from D1Baseball.com, put together this chart to show the power distribution of the Oklahoma offense.

45 home runs in the last 20 games after 46 home runs in the first 43 games. The power surge has the Sooners scoring 9.4 runs per game in this NCAA Tournament.

Oklahoma’s pitching is being overshadowed by the offense, but the Sooners have allowed just over 4 runs per game in the NCAA Tournament. The squad has allowed only seven runs in three College World Series games too.

Luck and unforced errors

A best-of-75 series might be needed in MLB to determine the best team. Oklahoma and North Carolina will play a three-game series starting tomorrow.

Unforced errors are a key difference between amateur and professional sports. As you see in tennis, amateurs lose over 70 percent of points on unforced errors compared to professionals. The same can be said in the game of baseball.

Carolina last played in the National Championship Series in 2006 and 2007. The Heels lost both series to Oregon State. The Beavers needed only two games in 2007, but they needed all three games to defeat Carolina in 2006.

Carolina won game one in 2006 and the Heels had a 5-0 lead entering the bottom of the 4th inning in game two. After allowing seven runs in the bottom of the inning that included a wild pitch ricocheting into the Beavers' dugout to allow a run, Carolina lost game two 11-7.

Game three is a good microcosm of baseball. Oregon State beat UNC 3-2 to win the 2006 title. It's the way Carolina lost that stings.

The unforced errors.

Second baseman Bryan Steed’s errant throw led to an unearned run in the bottom of the eighth, and it proved to be the game-winning run. It’s easy to remember Steed’s miscue because it was the end of the game.

It's much harder to remember that the game-winning run reached base on a two-out walk. Carolina also made four total errors that game and two of Oregon State’s three runs were unearned. Pitcher Daniel Bard’s throwing error after fielding a bunt led to the game’s first run in the bottom of the fourth inning.

In the top of the sixth inning, and the game knotted at two, Carolina had runners at first and third with only one out. Tim Federowicz hit a groundball to third, and Oregon State threw out Josh Horton at home. Jay Cox was then caught in a pickle between second and third, and thrown out.

Unforced errors in the form of poor baserunning ran Carolina into a double play.

Later in the top of the eighth, Carolina had the bases loaded with only one out. Seth Williams went down on strikes to make it two outs. Horton then broke to steal home, and looked to have it stolen, but Benji Johnson swung at a pitch outside for strike three to end the inning.

The team with fewer unforced errors often comes out on top in amateur sports, especially baseball.

Because after all, do you really ever win at baseball?

That’s it for this week, and thanks for reading this far.

D1Baseball.com’s Bradley Smart is a recommendation for this week. He puts out a lot of great data visualizations. Here is another one that shows Oklahoma’s home runs over the season.

🤟 Enjoy this Friday afternoon in the middle of June 🤟

Let’s take a look at how the eight teams made it to Omaha using run differential by inning, we’ll start with the first bracket of teams slated to play on Friday.

Both Troy and West Virginia dropped a game in the opening round or Regional, and both those teams dominated in the Super Regionals. Troy defeated Little Rock by a combined 15 runs over two games and West Virginia beat Cal Poly by a combined 26 runs in two games.

The run differentials look a bit different for North Carolina and Ole Miss. Both teams have allowed just 20 runs, Carolina over six games and Ole Miss over five games.

Ole Miss has won all five of its games by a combined nine runs, including a pair of extra-inning wins against Arizona State in the Lincoln Regional. North Carolina cruised in three wins hosting a Regional and defeated USC in the Super Regional round by a combined margin of one run.

The other side of the bracket tells a different story.

Oklahoma meets Alabama on Saturday, and the Tide beat the Sooners two-out-of-three games earlier this season in Norman, Oklahoma. The Sooners had a stress-free Super Regional beating Kansas by a combined 18 runs over two games, but its upset over host Georgia Tech in the Regional round was anything but easy.

Alabama has allowed only 17 runs over five games, which is the second fewest amongst the eight teams in Omaha. The Tide did need extra innings to beat Oklahoma State in the Regional round, but they handled St. John’s in the Supers without much issue.

Texas and Georgia have yet to lose in the NCAA Tournament. The Longhorns’ +43 run differential over five games is the best amongst the field in Omaha. Georgia allowed 21 runs in its two wins over Mississippi State in the Super Regional round, which is more runs than Texas (15 runs in five games), Alabama (17 runs in five games), Ole Miss (20 runs in five games), and North Carolina (20 runs in six games) have allowed the entire tournament.

Carolina’s pitching log

Twenty-three different teams have advanced to the Men’s College World Series in the past three seasons. North Carolina is the only team that has been there twice, 2024 and this season (2026).

Carolina is making its 13th trip to the College World Series and ninth since 2006. The Heels made it all the way to championship series in both 2006 and 2007 in large part because of its pitching staff.

Pitching and defense have defined Carolina baseball over the past 20 seasons, and this season is no different.

UNC has used seven pitchers over its six NCAA Tournament games. Carolina got 22 of 27 innings out of its starting pitching in the Super Regional series win over USC, including a complete-game two-hit shutout from Jason DeCaro.

The pitching has been UNC’s strength all season and if Carolina can score seven or eight runs, the Heels will be tough to beat.

The format in Omaha gives advantages to teams with pitching depth. The opening round is similar to a Regional format, but with more rest after the first game, and the National Championship is a traditional three-game series.

Carolina’s 13 College World Series appearances are the second most by any team without a National Title. Only Florida State has more (24 total).

If that streak ends over the next two weeks, it’s probably because of Carolina’s pitching and defense.

A quick detour to talk about the SEC

Here is a hypothetical Q&A to talk about the SEC:

So, the SEC dominates college baseball, right?

The SEC has five members in the 2026 Men’s College World Series, the most ever by a single conference. This will be the ninth straight College World Series that features an SEC team in the National Title series.

If a team from the SEC wins it all, it will mark the seventh straight year a team from the conference has won the National Championship.

The SEC now has 16 members and 14 of those 16 members have made it to Omaha this decade too.

Got it, it must be weird that these teams play each other in the regular season and in Omaha again?

Not quite.

Georgia is on one side of the bracket and despite sharing SEC membership with Texas, Alabama, and Oklahoma, the Bulldogs didn’t play any of those three teams during the regular season or SEC conference Tournament this season.

In fact, Troy has played more games against SEC teams (two against Georgia, two against Alabama) than Georgia has played against the SEC teams in Omaha (three against Ole Miss).

Ah, so maybe conference dominance doesn’t mean what we think it means?

Make no mistake, the SEC and its members invest in college baseball. It’s been this way for a while. The league had four teams in the College World Series in 1997 and 2004.

There were 12 SEC teams playing baseball in 1997 and there are 16 teams today. The SEC didn’t add small schools either. Both Texas and Oklahoma came from the Big 12 and joined the league in 2024.

It’s possible I have a bad attitude about the fawning over SEC dominance in the sport, but how in the world is this surprising?

You added a team (Texas) that has won six National Titles, and we’re surprised that team is making it back to Omaha?

All the member schools don’t even play each other because of the bloated conference. We can’t have them play in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament because silly rules the committee doesn’t like change.

What is more surprising and a better story is that teams like Murray State and Troy have made it to Omaha despite playing in smaller leagues.

That’s it for this week. A few recommendations and fun data visualizations that caught my eye as of late:

• This decision quality chart from Isaiah Ochoa is a fascinating look at Owen Hull’s performance during last week’s Super Regional. Hull has as many hits (9) over three games in June as he did in 12 games in February.

• Shotgun Spratling of D1 Baseball shared West Virginia’s Chansen Cole’spitch chart for this past weekend. 121 pitches and none we’re in the upper third of the strike zone, allowing two runs on eight hits against Cal Poly.

• The World Cup starts tomorrow, and Luke Benz put together these simulations, which is handy given the expanded field.

🤟 Enjoy Omaha or the summer or the World Cup 🤟

In many ways, college baseball’s tournament has felt more pure than its counterparts in basketball and football. I’m not sure that’s the case anymore.

This year, the NCAA selection committee seeded the teams 1-32. It meant every 2-seed in a Regional is seeded in addition to the Regional host.

It doesn’t appear the seeding is a strict “snake” or the team seeded 17th doesn’t have to match the team seeded 16th overall. This hints at the longtime idea or rule that teams from the same conference cannot play in the same Regional.

This idea is obsolete in an era of bloated, coast-to-coast mega-conferences. Take a look at the SEC as an example. 12 of the 16 members of the SEC received a bid to the NCAA Tournament. Out of those 12 teams, there were 19 missed matchups between those 12 tournament teams.

The same thing is true for the ACC, Big 12, Sun Belt, and Big Ten. The only two leagues that received multiple bids and all tournament teams played each other are Conference USA (Jacksonville State, Liberty, Missouri State) and the Big West (Cal Poly, UC Santa Barbara).

Take a look at the data below:

Seven SEC teams are hosting a Regional this weekend. Four others are locked in as 2-seeds, forcing the committee to scatter those teams across the other nine Regional sites.

Tennessee and Ole Miss never played Auburn this season. Arkansas didn’t play Texas A&M. If they didn't play in the regular season, why can't they share a Regional site?

Because it just means more?

To be fair, this isn’t only an SEC problem. It’s true for North Carolina and Wake Forest in the ACC, or Coastal Carolina and Southern Miss in the Sun Belt.

But the SEC commands the attention given the strength of all its baseball teams. It’s been a strong league for a long time. The league even had eight teams in the 2006 NCAA Tournament.

The massive influx of television money changed the energy of college sports, and with it, brought entropy.

College sports is in a state of chaos. Some call it a crisis, but I once read that a crisis is where danger meets opportunity. I don’t know if there is a way to “fix” this entropy without radically changing the system.

Maybe college baseball teams need to start playing 45 league games and only 10 non-conference games? After all, 75 percent of an SEC team’s college football season will be in conference play.

Or maybe we need to blow up the model entirely and allow programs to belong to different conferences for different sports. Why couldn’t North Carolina play SEC baseball, but join the Big Ten for field hockey?

Of course, we could march towards a Super League or just have the SEC and Big Ten break apart too.

One thing that does feel reasonable is that the rules established when conferences had fewer members should not apply today.

If two teams from the same conference aren’t even guaranteed to play each other in the regular season, there is no reason to keep them apart in the NCAA Tournament.

Isn’t the entire point of competition to have these teams play each other?

Carolina’s Arm Barn

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about the pleasant surprise of Caden Glauber on North Carolina’s pitching staff. Carolina remains undefeated in games in which Glauber has made an appearance on the mound this season.

Glauber is one of four Carolina pitchers who make up a talented staff. Jason DeCaro, Ryan Lynch, and Walker McDuffie all made All-ACC teams this season.

The story of Carolina’s pitching staff this season is one where not all four pitchers are performing at a high level at the same time. One thing that is interesting to track for collegiate pitchers is usage and efficiency.

There are tons of stats to assess a pitcher’s ability, but what I find most useful is how many pitches it takes for them to get outs. So, let’s take a look at the efficiency by month of the season for Carolina’s arm barn using pitches per out.

Glauber has led Carolina as of late. The ACC Freshman of the Year has pitched at least three more innings than anyone else on the staff in the month of May, and he’s done so more efficiently than all three at around 5 pitches per out.

It’s been a rough go for Ryan Lynch as of late. Lynch leads the team in innings pitched with 77 total, which is 10 fewer innings than ace Jake Knapp collected entering the NCAA Tournament last season. Consider that Lynch has recorded nine fewer outs than Glauber in the month of May while throwing 37 more pitches. The sophomore has pitched into the fifth inning just twice in his last six starts.

DeCaro is the only one of Carolina’s primary arms to keep his pitches per out under 6.0 in every month this season so far. The junior has pitched at least into the fifth inning or longer in four of his last six starts.

This chart is probably a bit misleading for a reliever like McDuffie. The sophomore has appeared in 31 of Carolina’s 57 games this season. He has pitched in back-to-back games five times over the past three months.

Carolina is the fifth overall seed in the NCAA Tournament and it’s hosting a Regional for the third consecutive season. Whether Carolina makes it all the way to Omaha will depend on this quartet of arms, and here is hoping all four perform at the same time, so we can update this chart for the month of June.

That’s it for this week. Big thanks to pearatings.com, which made it easy to grab a full slate of games and put together the NCAA Tournament chart.

As we head into summer, you’ll probably find less frequent posts from me in this newsletter. I’m busy trying to be a good dad. I witnessed the toddler peel three bananas at once today, all while not eating any of those bananas. That sort of feels like college sports as of late.

My plan is to work on some offseason projects around college hoops and college football over the next three months. As a start or a soft launch, the 2026 college football schedule is loaded on cfbtxt.com.

🤟Enjoy the baseball and stay cool in this soupy weather 🤟

As it’s been for almost 20 years now1, the strength of Carolina’s club is its pitching staff. UNC welcomed multiple transfers to fill spots on the field, but the Heels did not have one pitcher transfer into the program this season.

The quartet of Jason DeCaro, Ryan Lynch, Walker McDuffie, and Caden Glauber have combined to throw 265 of a total 468 innings this season. Three of those four pitchers are returnees. The newcomer is Glauber. The Fort Mill, S.C. native has been the surprise of the season.

Glauber’s debut opening weekend was not great. Out of the bullpen, the freshman walked three Indiana batters to load the bases and gave up a single and two earned runs. His next few appearances were better before a breakout performance in a must-win game against Virginia.

The right-hander threw 5.1 innings and struck out eight Cavaliers to help Carolina avoid a three-game sweep at home. After that performance, Glauber settled into a reliable arm out of the UNC bullpen.

Here is how Glauber ranks across various advanced pitching metrics among qualified NCAA pitchers, according to fangraphs.com.

In addition to those numbers, Glauber led the ACC in ERA (1.96) and ranked second in opponent batting average (.181). Not just among freshmen, but all ACC pitchers.

Baseball is a team sport, but consider that Carolina is 22-0 in games Glauber has appeared in this season. The freshman has appeared in seven fewer games than teammate and fellow right-hander Walker McDuffie, but Glauber has recorded 25 more outs than McDuffie. He leads the team in strikeouts (74), recording one more than DeCaro (69) and five more than Lynch (68).

No pitcher is perfect. Glauber is tied for the lead in walks issued (33) and teams have put together runs against him, including this past weekend at NC State.

How Carolina uses Glauber this postseason is something to watch. He’s made two starts this season, Elon on April 3 and at Duke on April 25. His longest outing of the season was six shutout innings in a 14-inning win at Clemson on April 11.

Glauber is capable of changing a weekend for Carolina whether that's out of the bullpen or in a starting role. And a month from now, Carolina's season could be over or the Heels might still be playing in Omaha.

Glauber is the reason to believe it's the latter.

That’s it for this week. A recommendation is fangraphs.com, which is surfacing a ton of advanced player stats for NCAA players.

Carolina opens the 2026 ACC Tournament on Friday in Charlotte, NC. Given the games are in a triple-A ballpark, we should be able to follow along and get extra data from Statcast. The SEC Tournament is even using Automated Ball-Strike System (ABS) this week.

A week from today the 2026 NCAA Tournament will be announced. Carolina is expected to be a top-eight National Seed, which means the Heels are in line to play at home for the first two weekends for the third consecutive season.

I think you can make a case Carolina baseball has been the most successful men’s program at the university over the past few seasons.

🤟 Anyhow, enjoy the rest of the week and the month 🤟

In the past this newsletter has explored the consequences of bloated conferences in football and men’s basketball, but how does this show up in baseball?

There are 16 teams that play baseball in the ACC and each team is scheduled to play five three-game series home and away. There are two weekends left in the regular season, and here are the updated standings with run differentials.

The 2026 ACC baseball tournament starts May 19 in Charlotte, North Carolina. It marks the second straight season that all 16 teams earn a spot in the tournament.

The top four seeds receive a double-bye and seeds 5 through 8 receive a single-game bye. The number of tiebreakers are plentiful. The tiebreakers include head-to-head results, winning percentage against common opponents, run differentials, and even a coin flip.

Given each team misses five opponents in its own league, the tiebreakers are likely going to be used. Unbalanced schedules are more of a feature than a bug in major conferences.

Last week, North Carolina was scheduled to play three games during its exam period. The first was a 12-2 home loss to Coastal Carolina on Tuesday. The next day Carolina canceled its home game against Queens due to impending weather, despite it not raining until about 10 pm that night when the game was scheduled at 6 pm.

Now why would Carolina cancel that game?

Of course, weather was the provided reason, but it doesn’t take much to convince people that the game was canceled to protect the team’s RPI.

This is an all too frequent occurrence across college baseball over the past few seasons. 11point7.com even created an RPI Bingo card for any midweek cancellations.

NC State cancelled today’s game against North Carolina A&T. The two schools did not use weather as the excuse. Instead both programs mutually agreed to cancel the game.

What’s the deal with the RPI again?

The Ratings Percentage Index or RPI is one of the primary tools the NCAA selection committee uses to evaluate teams for the postseason. It’s featured prominently on all the nitty gritty reports provided by the NCAA.

RPI = (WP × 0.25) + (OWP × 0.50) + (OOWP × 0.25)

The three components:

• team winning percentage (25%)

• the opponent winning percentage (50%)

• opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage (25%)

The gist is who you play matters as much as whether you win.

A fun feature on warrennolan.com is impact games to show what a team might gain or lose in RPI points based on the result. Here is an example today using the Miami and Florida International game, and you can see why teams might cancel.

A Miami win delivers -16 RPI points to the Hurricanes.

As of now, Miami and FIU are still scheduled to play. In fact, it’s the last Tuesday special at Alex Rodriguez Park at Mark Light Field where you can get $4 beers and $2 hot dogs.

The RPI is a tried-and-true metric that is also outdated and flawed. Other metrics have emerged and there are tons of college baseball data analytic sites today that surface these metrics.

• d1baseball.com surfaces DSR (Diamond Sports Ranking) from 643charts.com

• PEARatings.com provides a composite NET rating complete with quadrants and tons of information

• 64analytics.com has a ton of player stats and rankings, mostly behind a paywall

A D-I baseball team plays over 50 games every regular season. Cancellations are going to happen. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes it rains.

And now sometimes you don’t play because the RPI?

There is a laundry list of items that are more important for the NCAA to reconcile than sorting out midweek baseball cancellations.

It’s bizarre though in a given week on the calendar that a team like North Carolina can cancel a midweek game because of the RPI and play a conference opponent (Duke) in a non-conference game.

Run differentials

This past football season, we tried to put together line scores for college football and point differentials by 5-minute segments in college basketball.

Baseball is a sport where almost everything is counted. The inning-by-inning run differentials can reveal a lot about teams.

Here is a look at Carolina’s run differential by inning against Top 100 RPI opponents. The NCAA surfaces a team’s record against Top 100 on the Team Sheets and Carolina is 21-8-1 against Top 100 opponents.

An early lead for Carolina is useful as the Heels are +27 in the first two innings of play against Top 100 opponents, and +73 overall. The only inning that UNC has a negative run differential is the 7th inning (-2 overall).

As we move toward the ACC Tournament in a couple weeks, the next two weekends are about seeding and securing a double-bye. Unbalanced schedules and weather will mean tiebreakers and run differentials will come into play.

That’s it for today, and thanks for reading this far.

A few recommendations this week are a treasure trove of data sites for college baseball: warrennolan.com, PEARatings.com, and d1baseball.com.

🤟 Enjoy the baseball 🤟

Here is a look at the first round picks since 2016 by college program and position. 318 picks across the last 10 first rounds.

Alabama has been the clear leader over this stretch with 32 first round picks since 2016, averaging around three first round picks per draft. The other college programs with 10 or more first round selections in this span: Ohio State (26), Georgia (21), LSU (15), Clemson (13), Michigan (13), and Florida (10).

If we break it out by position, defensive backs (DB) lead the way with 52 picks in the first round over the last 10 drafts. Tackles (42), wide receivers (42), defensive ends (40), quarterbacks (35), and linebackers (31) are the other positions with 30 or more first round selections since 2016.

Of course, position counts are a reflection of how you put together a roster. There are simply more defensive backs and linemen on a football team than quarterbacks.

The average pick number by position might tell a better story. Quarterbacks are selected at an average of 8.2 overall. In fact, 15 of the 35 quarterbacks drafted in the first round over this span were selected within the top three picks. Every other position is grouped together between pick 15 and 21, here is a full list:

position  avg_pick count
CB/WR     2        1
QB        8.2      35
DE        15.4     40
T         15.5     42
RB        16.4     14
TE        17.3     11
WR        17.5     42
DT        18.3     28
G         18.8     16
DB        18.8     52
LB        19.1     31
C         21       6

After tonight, we can add a new column to the table. Quarterback Fernando Mendoza out of Indiana is expected to be the first overall pick to the Las Vegas Raiders. Mendoza, who led the Hoosiers in winning the 2026 College Football Playoff National Championship, will be the first player from Indiana selected in the first round of the NFL Draft since 1994.

Mendoza, like a ton of other players, started his collegiate playing career at a different program. He began his collegiate career at California before transferring to Indiana, a route that would have been far less common a decade ago.

The transfer portal has fundamentally reshaped how rosters are built in college. When a player develops at two or even three programs before reaching the draft, the question of which school deserves credit for the player’s development becomes complicated1.

Did Caleb Downs develop more as a freshman at Alabama or did he become a “can’t miss” pro in two seasons at Ohio State?

David Bailey spent three seasons at Stanford before his breakout season at Texas Tech. Which program deserves the credit?

In reality, “deserves” got nothing to do with it. It’s more of an interesting question facing college athletics.

Let’s compare the transfer portal with the NFL Draft and European football’s transfer system. All three try to solve a similar problem of how to move talent from one place to another, and each system goes about it in different ways.

The NFL Draft is more of a controlled market. A team gets a pick of the talent based on where the team finishes in the standings and the worst teams often pick first. Players don’t really have a say2 in where they are picked. It’s explicitly intended to balance competition by distributing talent and giving bad teams a path back to relevance. Of course, free agency is a different story, but there is a collective bargaining agreement that sets a market.

European football has its own transfer market. Players and clubs negotiate, transfer fees are paid, and talent flows to whoever can afford it. There is no draft, no slotting, no real mandate to help the weakest clubs. The result can be persistent dynasties at the top, but a high payroll alone doesn’t mean success. Ask a Tottenham fan how that is going right now.

The college transfer portal sits somewhere in the middle. An opaque market without any enforceable rules waiting for the government to save it from its strategy of inertia. Players are free to go from school to school and get paid whatever the school is willing to pay them.

Fans and coaches complain about the system. And now even the NFL coaches are wanting to blame the portal for the lack of talent in this year’s NFL Draft.

This week in The Athletic, Bruce Feldman reported why some NFL coaches think the transfer portal is killing prospect development. Feldman speaks with a veteran defensive line coach that calls this year’s defensive tackle class the “worst group in 10 years” and suggests player movement is the reason why.

Feldman’s points out the top offensive lineman prospects in this year’s draft, Miami’s Francis Mauigoa and Utah’s Spencer Fano, as examples of players that never transferred and perhaps that is the reason the two players have developed into first round prospects.

The transfer portal isn’t inherently bad. Players finally have some agency and they’re finally being compensated. It’s not a silver bullet solution though, and at some point, don’t we have to realize we’re just trading problems? There aren’t any perfect solutions.

The labor was free for decades, and this brought its own set of problems. But isn’t it a little unfair to blame the portal for a weak draft class?

It’s as if we can’t see the forest for the trees. Perhaps, if we don’t want to label the people we pay as employees, there are consequences.

Or maybe if we don’t actually want to pay coaches less money compared to the entire college athletics operation, there are consequences too.

And maybe even if a program pays a player a significant chunk of change and it doesn’t work out, we fail to realize that bad deals happen all the time3.

Maybe we can’t see the forest for the trees because we actually cut all the trees down in the process.

The transfer portal can’t be the scapegoat forever.

That’s it for this week, and thanks for reading this far.

A recommendation this week is this visualization from Ray Carpenter showing the Philadelphia Phillies runs by inning. I’ve recommended Ray’s work before, he makes excellent data visualizations, and you can read more of his work on football and golf.

🤟 Enjoy the draft or complain about the transfer portal 🤟

We can actually try to measure this using game-by-game player logs:

• add up each player’s minutes per team per season

• set a threshold of players with at least 500 total minutes logged

• for each player and season, look back to the previous season

• ask did the same player play at least 500 minutes for a different team?

• count those players and divide by total players that played at least 500 minutes

During the 2022–23 season, about one in eight players played at least 500 minutes at a different program in the previous season.

This past season?

Nearly one in four.

The player movement era is here, and it shows up in multiple places.

Four out of the five players1 in the starting lineup for the national champion Michigan Wolverines played for a different team last season.

Only 22 high-major scholarship players celebrated four years at one program this past season.

The average minutes continuity across all Division-I programs is 24.9 percent2. That same figure was almost double four seasons ago as 48.9 percent during the 2021-22 season.

We’re in the middle of the current transfer portal window for this season. The 15-day window opened April 7 and it closes April 21.

The people who cover and follow the sport describe portal moves as gets. There are good gets and bad gets, and even the best get of all-time.

Of course, defining a get or a team’s addition of a new player as good or bad is subjective. There is no collective bargaining or public contracts.

Some players have professional representation and others have friends or advisers. Any deal between a player and team isn’t public. No one can accurately describe a team’s budget because it’s a moving target.

The reality is there is no salary cap. Between revenue share and donor contributions, you can spend however much you want and it can be reported in figures that you can’t reliably confirm.

Remember that there is always more money in the banana stand.

During Clemson’s dismantling of North Carolina by 20 points last season, the ESPN broadcast put up this graphic to describe the 2025 college men’s basketball non-negotiables.

There is a ton to unpack in the five listed items. All five are just as ambiguous as trying to make sense of the actual transfer portal.

The “have to make smart return on investment” non-negotiable is my favorite. Of course, you want to get more out of a situation than what you put into it.

When it comes to player movement, defining that ROI is blurry. The market is cloudy and beating the market in a sport that declares a champion in a single-game elimination tournament is tricky.

The most important rule? There really are no rules. And I don’t expect that to change regardless of how many times Nick Saban tells me that the president is going to save college sports3.

Players were massively underpaid by the system in previous decades. Now, players are at least compensated, but it’s going to take time for the market and sport to correct itself.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to track player movement and use stats or models to do so. I’m blown away by some of the free, public tools out there to track the transfer portal.

But this is why I think we should change how the portal is covered.

For example, both Flory Bidunga and Jackson Shelstad committed to Louisville this week after entering the portal. Both players are represented by Momentous Sports Partners, and both committed on the same day.

Package deal? What other players have the same representation? Is there a public repository of players’ representation available anywhere?

We should also re-imagine minutes continuity or continuity in general.

As an example, Naithan George and Baye Ndongo played over 600 minutes together at Georgia Tech during the 2023-24 season. George played at Syracuse last season and Ndongo stayed at Tech, but this upcoming season both players will reunite after transferring to Pittsburgh.

Does that continuity get captured anywhere?

The sport is in the midst of a massive change. It’s messy. It’s opaque. And yes, it’s arguably less pure than it was years ago.

But it’s also becoming more transparent what the sport is: a business.

And it’s past time we start covering it like one.

Forget the good gets.

There are a lot of other ways we could cover the sport as it undergoes this transformation.

That’s it for this week, and thanks for reading this far.

Recommendations this week are a couple of free public tools, cbb.arkansasquant.com and colin-hanley1.github.io/cbb-analytics, to track college basketball players and the transfer portal. Also, big thanks to Connor, cobrastats, for his help with fetching player logs from barttorvik.com.

🤟 Enjoy the portal chaos 🤟

Michigan and UConn are no strangers to playing on a Monday night in April. The two programs have found wildly different success in the national title games.

UConn’s success in the Final Four is downright comical. The Huskies are now 13-2 overall in the Final Four and 6-1 all-time in championship games after the loss.

The Wolverines improved to 2-4 in title games since 1985. What might go unnoticed is that the last six times Michigan has made the Final Four, the Wolverines have also advanced to the National Championship game1.

Here is a list of every NCAA Champion since 1985, when the NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams. The table shows the Final Four appearances and overall record for each program, plus the record in any title games.

No other program can match UConn’s six titles out of eight trips to the Final Four. Duke, North Carolina, and Kansas all have more Final Four appearances since 1985 and fewer NCAA Tournament absences than UConn in this span. All three blue bloods have won fewer titles than the Huskies since 1985.

Michigan won only 45 of 100 games from the start of the 2021-22 season to the end of the 2023-24 season. The Wolverines have won 64 games over the last two seasons under head coach Dusty May culminating with a win Monday night in the National Championship.

The Most Outstanding Player of the 2026 Final Four was Elliot Cadeau, a transfer from North Carolina. You could describe Cadeau’s play at Carolina as volatile, very bad and very good, all at the same time. His confidence was broken in Chapel Hill and reimagined in Ann Arbor.

Cadeau continues a streak of the last three MOPs of the Final Four all starting their collegiate careers at a different program:

• 2026: Elliot Cadeau (North Carolina → Michigan)

• 2025: Walter Clayton Jr. (Iona → Florida)

• 2024: Tristan Newton (East Carolina → UConn)

No matter how broken a program or a player might be, there is always the possibility a turnaround is right around the corner. Cadeau, May, and Michigan all proved that on Monday night.

A new era of Carolina basketball

Cadeau’s former team, North Carolina, was in the headlines throughout the past two weeks seeking a new head coach.

Carolina ended its coaching search with the surprise hiring of Michael Malone as the program’s seventh head coach since 1953. He is the first head coach from outside the Carolina family since Frank McGuire.

The Carolina search is a good example of how we consume information in the year of 2026. We moved past the Brad Stevens fan fiction, tussled our way through sitting head coaches still competing in the NCAA Tournament, found out that Steve Kerr is Tommy Lloyd’s Michael Jordan2, and Billy Donovan’s agent really wanted to earn his representation.

Whether you believe Malone was the search committee’s first and last call doesn’t matter. Malone is the choice as the next head coach at Carolina.

You can spend time talking yourself into the hire. Malone knows basketball. He won a World Championship with the Denver Nuggets in 2023. Very few guys can coach Demarcus Cousins, and Malone could do it. He spent time on Carolina’s campus watching his daughter play volleyball for the Tar Heels, so he is familiar with the community.

You can also talk yourself out of the hire too. Malone has never been a collegiate head coach. And he is now getting paid more than 99 percent of other head coaches in college basketball. Malone has never had to deal with the transfer portal.

There is also the Belichick of it all. Carolina made a risky hire in football by bringing in someone with zero collegiate experience and paying them a significant chunk of change. After this weekend, the Savannah Bananas are likely to have as many wins in Kenan Stadium as Carolina football did this fall3.

If you can think critically, I don’t think Malone and Belichick deserve a lot of comparisons. At the same time, Carolina deserves criticism when making these high stakes decisions because of what has transpired over the past 18 months.

There are many reasons why it might work and why it might not. In true 2026 fashion, a lot of people don’t even see an in between result with the hire either. Everything has to be on the extremes.

What I do know is a lot of the success of Carolina basketball is in the past. The program has felt more like a dinosaur as of late and Malone is tasked with making sure it doesn’t become extinct.

A couple of weeks ago we scrutinized the standard of Carolina basketball using the SRS or the simple-rating-system from Sports Reference. SRS rates teams using average point differential and strength of schedule.

Below is a chart that shows the SRS for every Carolina basketball season since 1954 and highlights successful seasons based on NCAA Tournament results and ACC results. The bar for success matches a lot of Malone’s contract incentives: a regular-season ACC first place finish, an ACC Tournament title, advancing to the Sweet 16 or Elite Eight, making the Final Four, or winning the national title.

Carolina’s run during the 2021-22 season was miraculous. UNC went from losing by 28 points at Miami on a Tuesday night in January to leading Kansas by 15 points on a Monday night in April. The blown lead in the title game resulted in a hangover that I’m not sure Carolina has still gotten over.

The last time UNC had back-to-back successful seasons using the criteria in the chart above was a decade ago. A Sweet 16 appearance in 2015 followed by an ACC Tournament title and runner-up finish in 2016, capped off by winning the 2017 National Championship.

The success since then has been more sporadic than sequential. And Carolina fans and its family are hungry for sustained success.

We don’t know if Malone’s hire will work or not. What we do know is that the only way most of us will be satisfied that it’s “working out” is success on the court. That starts with wins. ACC championships, Sweet 16s, Final Fours, and National Titles.

I believe Malone is a deadhead. The title of this post is Ripple, which is also the title of a beautiful Grateful Dead song. As a couple of the lyrics go:

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night

Carolina basketball has been wandering lately, and the highway back to the top isn’t simple. But as Michigan and Elliot Cadeau showed us Monday night, the road is always there if you’re willing to find a new way to walk it.

That’s it for this week.

If you’re looking for the final NET rankings for this past college hoops season, you can find a full archive here: wabwatch.com/data/net_archive.csv - the NCAA published the final standings on April 7, after no updates from March 15 (Selection Sunday) to the end of the NCAA Tournament.

A recommendation this week is draftballr.com, a historical NBA draft database that includes a treasure trove of information. It’s a lot to take in.

🤟 Thanks for reading this far🤟

2

What a quote. I think Lloyd and Carolina were a lot closer of a match than people realize, and I spent most of that Final Four weekend mumbling “Steve Kerr is my Michael Jordan” while walking around the house. Just a hilarious line.

Anyhow, here is a radar plot comparing the style of play of the last two Carolina coaches and Lloyd, and why some fans were clamoring for Lloyd.

All Duke had to do was hold onto the ball.

That’s what Grant Hill said to Bill Raftery immediately after Duke’s Cayden Boozer turned over the ball and Braylon Mullins drained a three-point shot to send UConn to the Final Four. The reaction in real time from both Rafferty and Hill was as if they just watched a stunning plot twist in a movie.

Number 1 seeds were 134-0 when leading by 15 or more points at halftime. The time and score of the game didn’t matter, until it did. And all it took was for Duke to screw up just once.

The Blue Devils squandered a 19-point lead in the first half, a nine-point lead with five minutes remaining, and a two-point lead with 10 seconds left and the ball. While you can’t boil it down to that one play, let’s try to examine the last five minutes of the game.

Five minutes

Isaiah Evans made two free throws to extend Duke’s lead to 67-58 with 5:03 remaining in the game. A second straight trip to the Final Four was almost certain for the Blue Devils with a win probability at around 95 percent and only 300 seconds left in the game.

UConn outscored Duke 15-5 over the final five minutes or nine possessions. If we stitch together the possessions in a line score, we find seven scoring trips for the Huskies to just three for the Blue Devils. UConn attempted four more shots and three more free throws than Duke because the Blue Devils turned the ball over three times.

Those five minutes began with a 7-0 UConn run to cut the lead to two points with just under 4 minutes remaining in the game. UConn’s Silas Demary Jr. started that run by letting the ball advance past half court without taking a single second off the game clock or shot clock, see the video below.

This manipulation of the clock is something we’ve seen throughout the tournament. Nebraska pulled a similar maneuver against Iowa in the Sweet 16.

Those seconds Demary saved after the made free throw turned out to be useful at the end of the game. The Huskies cashed in with quick scores after multiple Duke turnovers over the last five minutes. Once UConn applied some game pressure, it was as if only bad things happened quickly for Duke.

Here is how that looks if we plot the time of each possession over the entire game:

Teams that control the clock can gain an advantage. A few weeks back, we wrote about how Duke is so deliberate with its use of the ball and often playing at a slower pace. While UConn’s offensive possessions often take a long time, the amount of off-ball movement and cutting is anything but slow.

UConn will meet Illinois in the Final Four this weekend in Indianapolis. The Huskies beat the Illini 74-61 way back in November in a game that featured 66 possessions.

When we plot the average possession length on offense and defense for the four teams remaining in the tournament, we find Illinois and UConn both use the clock in nearly identical fashion. UConn and Illinois figure to be the undercard of the night because the other semifinal matchup between Arizona and Michigan is a different story.

Both Michigan and Arizona play fast with average possession lengths around 15.5 to 16.5 seconds on offense. How the clock is controlled in this matchup will be something to watch this weekend.

The Final Four since 1985

Below is a chart that shows every team that has made the Final Four since the NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams. The chart highlights the 2026 Final Four participants.

UConn has made three of the last four Final Fours. The Huskies were back-to-back champs in 2023 and 2024, and have won the National Championship six times in its previous seven Final Four trips.

Michigan hasn’t found the same success in the Final Four. This marks the sixth trip to the Final Four since 1985 for the Wolverines and the first since 2018. Michigan’s only National Title came all the way back in 1989.

Illinois last made the Final Four in 2005, and this is the Illini’s third trip since 1985. Illinois finished 37-2 in 2005 and lost in the National Championship game to North Carolina.

Arizona is making its return to the Final Four for the first time since 2001. The Wildcats won the title in 1997 and finished as the runner-up in 2001 losing to Duke in the season’s final game.

That's 25 years between Final Four trips for Arizona. For some programs, a quarter century flies by before the window opens again. And for other programs, everything can change in five minutes or five years.

Five years

Five years ago from yesterday, North Carolina’s Hall of Fame head coach Roy Williams announced his retirement. A few days later, assistant Hubert Davis was named Carolina’s next head coach.

Today, North Carolina is looking for a new head coach and current Arizona head coach Tommy Lloyd is rumored to fill the job depending on whether you believe actual journalists or crooked prediction markets.

Two months later in June 2021, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski announced the 2021-22 season would be his last season as a head coach and Jon Scheyer would be the next head coach. Krzyzewski’s coaching career ended in a loss to North Carolina and first-year head coach Hubert Davis in the 2022 Final Four. Last week, Davis was fired after posting a 125-54 record in five seasons at North Carolina.

Jon Scheyer, Duke’s successor at head coach, has won over 83 percent of his games in four seasons for the Blue Devils. Three conference tournament championships, a Final Four appearance, but no National Titles yet.

In fact, Scheyer has coached the same number of Final Four games as former NC State head coach Kevin Keatts. The Wolfpack beat Duke in the Elite Eight to earn a trip to the 2024 Final Four. Keatts was fired after a 12-19 record in 2025. Two coaches with wildly different trajectories, and yet here they are in the same sentence.

Five years ago, Will Wade was the head coach at LSU. Wade was being investigated by the FBI in 2021 and was later fired by LSU in 2022. It turns out Wade replaced Keatts as the head coach at NC State this past season, and just left in the middle of the night to return to Louisiana. He was again introduced as LSU’s head coach a few days ago.

I’ve never been more sure that time moves faster and faster as you get older. Because a lot can happen in five years.

Or five minutes.

Or 300 seconds.

That’s it for this week, and thanks for reading this far. Sticking with the theme this week, a recommendation is 4.7 Seconds: For the Championship from TNT Sports. It’s a look back at the 2016 NCAA Tournament Final between Villanova and North Carolina.

🤟 Enjoy Final Four weekend 🤟

This has led to all sorts of opinions and narratives. And every argument is a circular argument if you try hard enough.

The loop that has drawn my attention keeps coming back to the same three questions: Is this the standard? Has the standard slipped? What is the standard?

If we’re asking these questions, it’s probably already too far gone. But in the spirit of this newsletter, let’s look at actual data and try to make sense of it.

The historical standard

When people say standard, I think they mostly mean consistency. The expectation was a program at the top of the sport, year in and year out.

SRS, simple-rating-system, from Sports Reference, rates teams using average point differential and strength of schedule. We have data going back to 1960, and it gives us the longest, cleanest look at Carolina basketball’s history.

Carolina has peaks and valleys over 80-plus years, as you would expect. Those valleys drifted around an SRS of 10 in 2000, 2010, and 2020: coaching transitions, an academic scandal, and a global pandemic.

The peaks are why UNC sits in the top-five all-time in SRS out of 495 programs. From 1980 through the early 2000s, Carolina was consistently above 20 in SRS. That's the number that built the blue blood reputation. That's the standard people are referencing, even if they can't articulate it.

The March standard

Carolina basketball has played in more Final Fours (21) than any program in history. It defined success by winning in March.

If we zoom out post-Dean Smith, the program has won three national championships and made eight Final Fours since 1998. The seeds and those results tell a more specific story.

From 1998 to 2000, Carolina made two of those Final Fours under Bill Guthridge. The 1998 Final Four came as a No. 1 seed and the 2000 Final Four as an 8 seed. The 1999 Tar Heels were eliminated in the first round by Harold Arceneaux and 14 seed Weber State.

A three-year stint under Matt Doherty, included a 2 seed that ended in the Round of 32 and back-to-back missed NCAA Tournaments.

Under Williams, Carolina averaged a 2.7 seed and had eight No. 1 seeds across his 18 seasons as head coach. Missed tournaments were rare, and when they happened, they felt like anomalies because of the previous seasons of success. We even rationalize the 14-19 2019-20 campaign because the tournament was cancelled due to COVID.

The five seasons under Davis average out to a 6.5 seed. The résumé includes a runner-up finish in 2022, a missed tournament as the preseason No. 1 ranked team, a Sweet 16 exit as a 1-seed in 2024, and now back-to-back first-round losses. The 2022 run happened and no fan should want to give those games back, but the volatility around the past five seasons is real and it’s visible in the data.

The margins in a single-elimination tournament are razor thin. One game can define a season in either direction. But five seasons is enough of a sample to see a pattern, and the pattern shows a deviation from what came before it.

The identity standard

A chief criticism of the Davis era, and the one that’s harder to quantify, is the lack of a recognizable identity.

A Roy Williams team had a distinct profile. Relentless offensive rebounding and a fast pace. His teams weren’t always elite defensively, but they didn’t need to be. The 2017 title run is a good example, Carolina shot worse than three of its six NCAA Tournament opponents and still cut down the nets.

If the four factors are the building blocks of efficiency, we can try to use these to identify a team’s style under each coach. Of course, there have been rule changes that make the comparison tricky, so let’s only use the last 10 seasons.

The radar charts below show the median rank across the four factors on both offense and defense. A perfect circle would mean a team has perfect ranks in every factor.

What we forget is the last two seasons under Williams, Carolina was just two games above .500 (32-30 overall). Davis took over and it was important to try something different, the previous results demanded it.

Davis’ teams avoid turnovers and show above-average offensive numbers. The extreme offensive rebounding strength for decades has become ordinary.

What’s replaced that extreme is a clear focus on a more conservative defensive approach with a defensive turnover rate at the bottom of all of Division-I over the past five seasons. That doesn’t mean bad defense, but it does mean more shots for opponents.

The program has an identity under Davis or any coach. It’s just not always familiar. And when the results don’t compensate for the difference in style, it leaves everyone questioning the identity.

Meanwhile, in the current NCAA Tournament

The first weekend of the 2026 NCAA Tournament is complete. It was a wonderful, dramatic weekend of basketball.

The average seed of the remaining 16 teams is 3.8, which is a tick above last season’s 3.4 average seed in the Sweet 16.

Here is a breakdown of the remaining teams left by seed:

Last week, we wrote about this tournament feeling more predictable than ever, and the first weekend brought a lot of chalk. It was also a good reminder that single-game elimination can still deliver some chaos.

The defending champions got sent home by a 9 seed. The No. 1 overall seed trailed by double digits against a 16 seed at halftime. The sixth-largest comeback in tournament history happened too, and changed the trajectory of one of the sport’s premier programs.

Carolina is in a position to dramatically change its future. There is a hunger to get back to the standard. And that standard is well-documented and at the same time abstract.

We can point to the data. The consistent SRS numbers, the high tournament seeds, and the most Final Four appearances in history. We can say that’s what we want back. But the truth is the standard means something different to everyone.

Whether the next era meets the standard, redefines it, or proves that the golden age was not an outlier is the only question left worth asking, and the answer looks different depending on who you ask.

Thanks for reading this far, and big thanks to Ryan Campbell who helped put together the charts and edit this post.

A recommendation this week is this article from the Sports Illustrated vault by Tim Crothers and the late Grant Wahl about Bill Guthridge’s retirement.

Enjoy the rest of the NCAA Tournament. I’m trying to keep a schedule and previous results at the home page of wabwatch.com, maybe you find that useful. 🤟

2.6 billion to 1

That's the odds of a perfect men’s tournament bracket this year, if you picked based on kenpom.com ratings and assume that those ratings represent the true probabilities.

Last year, the perfect bracket odds were about 10 billion to 1.

When I looked at this way back in 2010-2014, the odds averaged around 50 billion to 1.

- Mike Beuoy, inpredict

Part of why the odds are better this year is the field itself. Will Warren, Basket Under Review, has pointed out the gap in strength between seeds is larger than ever. Chris Fallica shared this is the first time since 1986 that all four 2-seeds are favored by at least 20 points in the first round.

And John Gasaway wrote that what appears to be happening is that teams ranked in the 40s are improving relative to the Division I average. The delta is that those teams are just not improving as rapidly as the teams in the top 10. This isn't just about weak bubble teams to stoke an anti-tournament expansion agenda. It's about elite teams becoming more elite.

So let’s visualize the gap. We’re going to use the median adjusted efficiency margin by seed for the 68 team field over the past three seasons on Selection Sunday. We’re grouping the seeds together in four tiers: 1-4, 5-8, 9-12, 13-16.

Here's a reminder of what adjusted efficiency margin actually measures:

• take a team’s points scored minus points allowed

• estimate it per 100 possessions

• adjust for opponent strength and game location

The chart spells it out. The adjusted efficiency margin has improved for 1-4 seeds, 5-8 seeds, and 9-13 seeds over the past two seasons. The strength of 13-16 seeds has gotten worse over the past two seasons.

If we view the numbers in a table over the past three seasons by individual seed, we get the idea too.

Seeds 1 through 11 have all improved since the 2024 Tournament just two years ago. Seeds 12 to 15 have gotten worse, but the 16 seeds have actually improved this tournament. While that is true, the gap between the 1 seeds and the 16 seeds is greater than last season and the season before, again, proving Gasaway’s point about elite teams pulling away.

Adjusted efficiency margin is a useful way to measure the strength of teams or even try to predict the tournament. Last season, the top eight teams in Pomeroy’s ratings made the Elite 8 and the top four teams in his ratings made the Final Four.

The data says chalk. The tournament might say otherwise. We're about to watch what is likely the most perimeter-oriented NCAA tournament in history, and a cold or hot shooting night has a way of making favorites disappear.

During the course of the season, a team is never as good as its best performance and never as bad as its worst performance.

But in the NCAA Tournament, a team’s result can define its entire season. There are seldom moral victories. There is nothing to look forward to next season given you don’t even know the players on the team yet.

In order to understand how consistently each team in the tournament has played this season, we can take a look at Game Score. It’s a score from 0 (bad) to 100 (perfect) computed per game by Bart Torvik that paints a picture of a team’s consistency.

We’ve done this in the past, and let’s do it again for the 68 teams in this single-game elimination event. The table below shows the median Game Score for all 68 teams, and it shows the best and worst Game Score in every team’s season. This includes last night’s First Four Games (86 Howard, 83 UMBC and 68 Texas, 66 NC State).

The 1-seeds all have a median Game Score of 99 or better. Arizona is the only one-seed that has put together a season without a Game Score lower than 85.

UConn (29.5), Nebraska (27.1), Wisconsin (29.3), Texas Tech (26.7), Gonzaga (23.2), North Carolina (21.6), BYU (14.0), and St. John’s (9.1) are all seeded 2 through 6 and all have a Game Score lower than 30. Remember 50 is average.

A team can turn in a poor Game Score and win. While a poor performance doesn’t always mean a poor result, it can reveal a lot about a team's capacity to go on a run in a lose-and-you-are-out tournament or play an absolute stinker and go home.

Pomeroy’s numbers are so good, yet we haven't even reached fewer zeroes in the probability of a perfect bracket. It’s still unlikely. And that is a feature of the sport, not a bug.

We have improved our predictability of the tournament field. 207 people correctly picked the entire 68-team field, according to the Bracket Project. Several people who try to predict the bracket every year got their highest score ever this season, but still weren’t even in the top-200 in the bracketmatrix.com results.

Pomeroy himself has noted his priors have sharpened because rosters are more experienced and there is more player-level data to work with than ever before.

And yet. There is still a 0.000000000385 percent chance of a perfect bracket. Of course, it is more likely than it was a decade ago.

While better more data feels like progress, are we sure perfect predictability is the point? Maybe the tournament is most itself when it surprises us.

Two of the most important questions to ask of the NCAA Tournament are “Why?” and “Why not?”

The trick is knowing which one to ask.

Thanks for reading this far, and enjoy the tournament.

I’m trying to keep wabwatch.com updated with the NCAA Tournament schedule and results this week. The home page is meant to be a quick way to see the schedule on mobile, and I hope you find it useful.

Tons of fun things to consume this week in prep for the tournament, hope you find some of the links in the post as recommendations on what to listen to or read.

🤟 Enjoy the tournament 🤟

By the numbers:

• 27 teams in green earned an automatic bid and 25 of those teams were seeded 9 through 16

• Four teams in yellow earned an at-large bid in the First Four or the play-in games (NC State, Texas, SMU, Miami Ohio)

• Four teams in purple earned both an automatic bid and will also play in the First Four (Lehigh, Prairie View A&M, Howard, and UMBC)

• Six teams were listed as the first teams out (Auburn, Indiana, Oklahoma, San Diego State, Stanford, New Mexico)

So what about the teams on the bubble?

There are tons of different ways to compare bubble teams. Pick your poison or select the data you want to use to make your case.

In this house newsletter, we believe in using Wins-Above-Bubble (WAB) and the data we’ve been tracking all season over at wabwatch.com.

You can use any power rating to calculate WAB. We’re using Bart Torvik’s ratings because these ratings are public and tried-and-true over time. The NCAA uses their own NET ratings to compute WAB. Others can use Massey ratings or kenpom.

WAB tells you a lot about how a team performed against its schedule. This season gave us an extreme comparison, which is useful to understand WAB.

Miami Ohio earned an at-large bid and the Redhawks will play SMU on Tuesday in the First Four. Auburn was left out of the tournament.

Miami Ohio won 31 games, yet three of those wins were against Non-DI teams.

Auburn finished one game above .500, however, they do play in the almighty SEC and the Tigers were the only team this season to beat 1-seed Florida at home.

Auburn’s win at Florida is worth about the same in WAB as Miami Ohio’s wins at Wright State, at Toledo, and at Bowling Green.

Miami Ohio’s loss on a neutral floor against Massachusetts is more damaging than losing at Ole Miss, but the problem is Auburn also dropped games to Texas A&M at home and on the road at Mississippi State. Oh, and Auburn also lost 13 other games even though they were against quality opponents.

Miami Ohio shot under par on a par 3 course and Auburn shot above par at Torrey Pines. If you want, you can still compare any two teams with more data at wabwatch.com/comps.

For example, here is Auburn and SMU, which might surprise you:

The committee’s job is not easy. In my opinion, the past two seasons have been a giant step forward in using WAB as a way to cut through noise and admit teams to the Big Dance. At the same time, last season’s inclusion of North Carolina was labeled a crime and miscarriage of justice. It remains to be seen if the others feels the same way about Auburn this season.

WAB feels like a better way to determine which teams deserve an at-large bid. It’s not perfect, however, it's sharpened part of the science of bracketology.

When it comes to seeding teams, it’s a little more art than science. There are tons of factors for seeding teams, including geography, injuries, predictive metrics, and even the goal of creating a compelling TV show.

March is supposed to be mad. The numbers we've tracked all season matter right up until they don’t. Now that we know the field, every team has a WAB of zero and no one cares about building a résumé in the tournament.

We just care about wins, and after all, isn’t that the whole point?

No matter a team’s past, once the tournament begins this week, every team has a spotless future.

Thanks for reading this far.

Huge thanks to bracketmatrix.com, which I frequented most of this week. It’s a great, free resource that can help you gauge where your favorite team might land in the tournament.

Hope to share some more data later this week, but for now, here is a CSV file of all the Tournament tip times for this week: wabwatch.com/data/tournament_schedule_2026.csv

🤟 Enjoy the week 🤟

WAB tells you a lot about what a team did against the schedule they played. While WAB summarizes a team’s résumé into a single number, we can also try to visualize it.

Instead of blind résumés, what if we think of it as Résumé Tetris instead?

Each game is a stick falling from the top of the chart. Wins stack to the right, losses stack to the left. The goal is to build enough green on the right side to cancel out the red on the left.

Here is a comparison of four different teams: Miami Ohio, Santa Clara, Auburn, and Virginia Tech.

You can find a similar visualization for any individual team over at wabwatch.com.

For example, take a look at SMU below. It would be wise for the Mustangs to avoid a loss to Syracuse today in the ACC Tournament:

SMU (19-12) +0.05 WAB

The second week of March means fewer “sticks” or games are falling for teams to build a tournament résumé, but it’s not the only way a team can gain entry to the NCAA Tournament.

Teams can also play their way into the Big Dance through their conference tournament. This is what NC State did two years ago, when the Wolfpack won five straight games en route to an ACC Tournament Championship, then parlayed that run straight to the Final Four.

That kind of run is rare, but it is also what makes conference tournament week worth the watch.

ACC Tournament Champions from 1954-2025

While we’re on the topic of conference tournaments, here is a look at what programs have won the most ACC Tournament titles since 1954.

Duke, North Carolina, and NC State are the only teams with double-digit tournament titles during this span. The Blue Devils have won 23 titles, including 13 since the year 2000. Ten of NC State’s 11 titles came before 1990.

Carolina’s success is more rooted in the past. The Heels have 17 total tournament titles, but only three of those titles have come since the year 2000.

Which brings us to Caleb Wilson

Someone once told me the key to happiness boils down to three things: something to do, something to look forward to, and someone to love.

As a Carolina fan, and if we’re being dramatic, Wilson checked all three of those boxes. It was a pleasure to watch him play. You looked forward to every game because of what he could do. And the freshman was genuinely easy to root for.

All of that gets taken away with last week’s news that Wilson is out for the season after breaking his right thumb, minutes after being cleared from a broken left wrist. Injuries happen, and Carolina is far from the only team to run into rotten injury luck this year. The timing and the circumstances make this one particularly hard to reconcile.

The news compounds a feeling of stagnation around the Carolina basketball program. If we’re being honest, the entire operation feels stale as of late.

There are fewer wins of consequence over the past several years. A rival down the road is widening the gap in talent and on-court success the past few years. An aging spry home venue in need of a new direction has turned into an awkward debate and now an arena discussion.

Caleb Wilson felt like a break from all of that. He was a reason to believe and gave fans a different feeling when thinking about the program. Now that Wilson won’t play again in college, Carolina heads into postseason play trying to give its fans something to look forward to in March.

And that feels like a harder ask than it should be for a program with its history of success.

Thanks for reading this far. A recommendation this week is Seth Burn’s tracking of the NCAA Tournament field in this spreadsheet. Seth created WAB, and he’s showing how you can compute it using different power rankings this week.

As a reminder, wabwatch.com uses Bart Torvik’s ratings to compute WAB. The NCAA uses its own NET ratings, so there might be slight differences between systems. My wish is the NCAA scraps quadrants altogether and starts printing the WAB values for each individual game on the Team Sheets.

🤟 Enjoy championship week 🤟

It will mark the last time that the Province of British Columbia practices Daylight Saving time. The Province is choosing to eliminate twice-yearly time changes to reduce disruptions, simplify scheduling, and provide an extra hour of light during the winter months.

As we all spring forward, so is the college basketball season. Time is starting to compress and most college basketball teams wish they could control time like the Province of British Columbia.

Selection Sunday is suddenly 10 days away.

On the court, time is a funny thing to track. NCAA Men’s college basketball is one of the only organizations that plays two 20-minute halves. The 40-minute game has built in timeouts for television every four minutes or so.

Teams are tied to a 30-second shot clock. The shot clock resets to 20 seconds when a team snags an offensive rebound to extend a possession.

There are 365 Division-I teams and there is more than one way to be successful. And how teams use time with the ball varies dramatically.

Take the top-10 teams rated in Ken Pomeroy’s power ratings through March 4 games. Pomeroy surfaces a tons of stats that reveal a team’s style. This includes the average possession length in seconds for teams on offense and defense.

Here is how those top-10 teams differ across average possession length on both offense and defense:

Over half of the teams have a longer average possession length on defense than offense. Slow defensive possessions tend to mean better defense, and the data backs that up. Duke, Michigan, Arizona, Florida, and Michigan State all play defense longer than offense, and all five own the best defensive rating, in order, in Pomeroy’s numbers.

Houston’s average possession length on offense and defense is an identical 18.4 seconds. You have to appreciate Kelvin Sampson’s point of view in his style of play regardless of player personnel. It’s always a grind.

Florida is a good antidote to the Cougars’ style of play. The defending champions attack with short offensive possessions and the fastest defensive possessions amongst these top-10 teams.

Arizona plays fast on offense and doesn’t mind opponents playing fast either. While Connecticut plays the “slowest” among all 10 teams on offense with an average possession length at 19 seconds, though Illinois is a hair behind at 18.9 seconds.

What’s fascinating is if you watched UConn and Illinois execute on offense, I’m not sure you would describe those offenses as slow. Sure the possession takes time, but there are elaborate sets with lots of cuts and movement to get good shots.

This is when just staring at the numbers can be a bit misleading. Pomeroy has attributed tempo to mostly average possession length on offense, but don’t confuse tempo with speed. Tempo is more about rhythm and control where speed is more about covering distance over time.

Now pace measures time over distance or in basketball pace measures how many chances (possessions) a team typically plays in a given game.

I’ve always loved this quote from hall of fame coach Roy Williams on playing fast:

My offensive philosophy is that we’re going to run. We’re going to try to make the other team’s players run faster and longer than they ever have run in their lives . . . because if I’m better than you are, the more possessions we play, the more likely it is that I’m going to beat you. If I play golf against Tiger Woods for one hole I might beat him, but over 18 holes, I have no chance.

Roy Williams with Tim Crothers, Hard Work: A Life on and off the Court

This has become a fundamental belief of mine when watching college basketball or maybe it’s just my preference in a style of play.

This brings us to Duke, the top-rated team in Pomeroy’s ratings.

Does Duke prefer to play slow or deliberate?

Duke’s adjusted efficiency margin is soaring in Pomeroy’s ratings. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that Duke doesn’t get enough credit, Duke is maybe the best team ever, and Duke is underrated.

All at the same time.

As someone who prefers a lighter shade of blue, Duke’s style of play under Scheyer is just as annoying as the Blue Devils’ dominance over the past two seasons.

I’ve quietly used the phrase “slow-it-down-Scheyer” when describing how Duke prefers to play. But I’m not sure slow is the right word.

Duke ranks 112th out of 365 teams in average offensive possession length at 17.1 seconds. Kentucky ranks 58th and plays about half a second faster on average on offense.

If we believe that the offense is in more control of its average possession length, and that is more of a driver of tempo, then I’m not sure the style of play is slow.

Now, I believe Duke’s tempo is more deliberate. And the Blue Devils have become more deliberate and more efficient over the season.

Since mid-January, Duke has played one game over 65 possessions with a 13-1 record over this stretch. The one game above 65 possessions was a 44-point win on the road at Notre Dame, played at 72 possessions.

The lone loss over the past 14 games was to rival North Carolina. As a reference, Carolina is not as lightning fast under now head coach Hubert Davis as the Heels were under Roy Williams. But Davis is a disciple of Williams, and he is on record that he wants to be the fastest team from free throw line to free throw line in the country.

Carolina’s average possession length on offense is 16.8 seconds or 86th out of 365 D-I teams. On defense, Carolina ranks 293rd in average defensive possession length at an average of 18 seconds.

So, how the hell did Carolina beat Duke?

When you first watched or re-watched the game, it felt as though you were waiting for the Blue Devils to knock out UNC. It just never happened.

Duke’s defense is the best in the country. You saw this early in the game as Duke led 14-5 after about five minutes of play.

Carolina was kept afloat in the first half because freshman Caleb Wilson managed to score over-and-over again.

UNC did try to run or get out in transition against Duke. The Tar Heels simply were not successful and botched several transition opportunities scoring just two fast break points in the first half. Duke stretched its lead to 11 points by halftime.

The second stanza was a different story. Now, Carolina was whistled for one total foul in the second half. That’s a fact, and it’s a point many fans believe is the reason why Carolina won the game.

Remember that we must believe in luck because how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like.

What’s also a fact is the Blue Devils scored nine total points over the final 10 minutes of game time. Duke missed 13 of its last 17 shots.

Let’s plot the possessions.

Carolina hung around despite going through a scoring drought in the middle of the second half because Duke matched that scoring drought. Carolina put together a 9-0 run to close the game with a score-stop-score-stop-turnover-stop-score sequence.

Duke’s average possession length on offense on those last three empty possessions was around 23 seconds. This included back-to-back missed two-point shots by Cam Boozer in possessions well over 20 seconds.

Now, that’s not why Duke lost, but it’s also part of why Duke didn’t win or extend the lead. Boozer is the expected National Player of the Year for good reason, he is a methodical player with uncanny composure. The Blue Devils expected Boozer to execute down the stretch.

But it didn’t work out.

Carolina’s offensive possessions were productive, though not terribly short. Henri Veesaar drained a three-point shot about 15 seconds into the shot clock to the tie the game, which was the most aggressive and shortest possession down the stretch.

UNC found the bottom of the net three times all behind the three-point line to close the game on a 9-0 run to gain its first lead with 0.4 seconds before the buzzer ended.

Roy Williams believed more possessions meant more chances for the better team to win. Jon Scheyer seems to believe the opposite, that fewer, more deliberate possessions is better.

The beauty is that both strategies can bring success.

Like the Province of British Columbia, as a head basketball coach, you can choose how you want to try to control time.

That’s it, and thanks for reading this far.

No bracketology this week, I’m leaving that to the professionals 🙃

You can check out wabwatch.com though if you want to take a look at Miami Ohio’s perfect 30-0 record using WAB.

Carolina and Duke meet for the second time this season on Saturday. It’s logical to expect a different game and outcome. UNC is shaky on the road, Duke is stellar at home, and Pomeroy even suggests Duke will win by 16 points.

It will mark the 13th time that Carolina is a double-digit underdog at Duke, according to TeamRankings BetIQ tool. Carolina is 3-9 straight up in the previous 12 meetings.

It’s the game that always delivers, and the fun is we don’t for certain what it will deliver on Saturday.

Sticking with the Duke theme, a recommendation this week is an interview with Shane Battier on the Bet the Process podcast. Battier talks NBA analytics and coaching his own children, with some culture and corporate speak sprinkled in. Overall, a good interview on the game of basketball and how it’s changed.

🤟 Don’t forget to set those clocks forward this weekend 🤟

And a win at Minnesota is similar to beating Virginia at home or Saint Louis on a neutral floor.

A win against BYU on a neutral floor is roughly the same as winning at Grand Canyon or beating Tennessee at home.

All of these results actually happened this college basketball season. These comparisons are made using Wins-Above-Bubble or WAB.

One of the reasons I like Wins-Above-Bubble (WAB) is I find it to be easier to understand. Sure, the math can be scary. The pronunciation of the WAB is confusing too.

Instead of pontificating what makes a win a quality win or even a quality loss, WAB summarizes it into one number. Almost nothing in the world is 0 or 100 or black and white, and WAB is no different.

You don’t need to check an opponent’s kenpom1 or Torvik rating to make sure it’s a quality win. You don’t need to rely on a fluctuating NET ranking without an explicit rating that bins teams into arbitrary quadrants.

And you don’t need to wonder if a team won the game by enough points or if the pace was right to project a better win2.

You can focus on the result. A win is positive and a loss is negative. How positive or negative depends on where the game was played and the strength of the opponent.

You can find other WAB equivalents over at wabwatch.com on any team page. For example, beating Duke is similar to . . .

It’s been fun to see WAB go mainstream over the past year. I do worry that it’s a new piece of information for a lot of fans, and you can get stuck in the weeds because there is so much information and data available today.

We rarely adjust what we think to fit new information. Instead we often do the opposite, by changing how we interpret information to fit what we want to believe.

I took no pleasure in beating the WAB drum last season as my favorite team reaped the rewards of the metric, and it was labeled a crime. I mean, wabwatch.com is one of the nerdier things I’ve ever put together, and if I had to build it over again, I would likely do many things differently3.

It’s much more fun to enjoy the sport for the actual happenings on the court. And yet here I am, running a WAB website, so take that with a grain of salt.

Bracketology overshadows a lot of those things this time of year, and we should not forget that the best part of March is not debating who gets in the tournament.

It’s the actual basketball.

That’s it for this week, and thanks for reading this far.

A recommendation this week is Patrick Stevens’ NCAA Tournament projections, Seeded Territory, published over at oviesandgiglio.com. Patrick has covered college sports and college hoops for as long as I can remember, and Ovies and Giglio picking up Patrick’s work after the debacle at the Washington Post was a great idea.

🤟 Enjoy the hoops this weekend 🤟