One of of the interesting reports and data crunches from college basketball nerd, Bart Torvik, looks at performance in the NCAA tournament from 2000-2018. He filters performance in two ways: 1) performance in the tourney against KenPom expectations and 2) performance in the tourney against seed expectations.

http://barttorvik.com/cgi-bin/ncaat.cgi?type=coach&sort=1&yrlow=2000&yrhigh=2018

Some interesting findings:

- Cal as a team has performed 237th out of the 250 teams who have made the tournament during this period. Only Stanfurd at #242 has under-performed more. The top Pac12 over-performing school is UCLA at #7, followed by Oregon at #11 and Arizona at #17.
- The most over-performing school overall is North Carolina and the worst is Virginia (losing to a 16 seed will do that).

-Among coaches, all of our previous coaches have under-performed in the tournament on these criteria
+Todd Bozeman - #180 out of the 364 who coached games in the tourney during this time
+Ben Braun - #310 of 364
+Cuonzo Martin - #324 of 364
+Mike Montgomery - #360 of 364
-Ben Howland was the Pac12's top over-performing coach during the period, followed by Andy Enfield, Sean Miller and Steve Lavin.
-Despite winning three titles during this period, Mike Krzyzewski and Duke have been one of the top under-performers, ranking 340th out of 364 thanks to several defeats to lower-seeded teams.
(note: rankings include games coached at other schools, as in the case of Monty and Cuonzo)

Wow. That's why no Sweet 16 since 1997.

After noticing that Tony Bennett is dead last, I was ready to shoot holes in the methedology (which is both
"easy to do"......because I can pick a lot of contrary examples...and "impossible"....because I don't know
much about all the algorithms involved). For example, Bennett's results are skewed because of the historic
loss to UMBC last year. But, even taking that game out, he would still be around 275 or so)

Well, all of that became (as the guyss from Monty Python would say) silly once I clicked on FAQ, and then clickedon About Me.

I realize my PC is on borrowed time, but....back in the day.....that was called "rickrolling".
Now, if you folks come up with anything other than Never Gonna Give You Up..you may be able to
reach me in front of the White House.

Bennett has definiteky had some issues in the tournament with some good teams, even apart from last year's historic upset. It's strange. Since he's been at the UVA, they been at the top of the ACC most years and yet he's had 2 first round exits, 2 second round exits and just 1 S16 and E8. Part of the issue with that data is that it's all based on expectation sonof you're a 1 seed, you get hammered with a loss. Lot of room to get punished in the data but not much upside. That said, the top coaches are still familiar names like Williams, Calipari (no doubt helped by making the finals as an 8-seed) and Izzo (multiple final 4s from 5-7 seeds).

Agreed TSF. But, seriously, click on About Me. I do some pro bono
consulting on websites....not SEO or making them like great.....but finding spelling/grammatical error, links that go nowhere or to an incorrect places, etc.etc.
Finding a link to Rick Astley....would be enough for me to reach out to the owner and/or web designer.
Unless you say I'm wrong, I'll notify Bart Torvik tomorrow.It's no big deal...it's to help him.

This is interesting, but pretty meaningless in terms of judging whether a team overachieved or underachieved in the post-season. Does it measure teams/coaches that underachieve in the post-season, or does it measure teams/coaches that overachieve in the regular season? How can you tell which is really being measured?

There is serious bias towards the mean in post-season with the one and done nature, so consistently higher seeded/ranked teams/coaches will naturally do worse -- the one and done nature means one is more likely to underachive with a high rating/seeding than to overachieve, so there is bias against those who consistently get high seeds like a Coach K, even if he wins multiple championships. And some of the sample sizes are pretty small.

Either way, this is judging post-season performance against regular season performance. One problem is that very often, in one game, much superior talent will win. So the coaches who tend to overachieve in the regular season will tend to underachieve in the post-season based on their regular season performance, when faced with more talented teams that tend to phone it in or play inconsistently during the regular season. Whereas some crappy teams who have coaches that can't get their players to perform up to expectations in the regular season, they phone it in too much or play inconsistently might be more likely to have good games in the post-season.

"UCLA really overachieved as an 8 seed under Lavin!! Lavin must be a great coach!" Or Lavin is a crappy coach whose teams lost WAY more than they should have in the regular season given their talent and ended up as an 8 seed, but in the post-season, actually played to their max when post-season came instead of phoning it in too many nights.

Give Monty a #1 seed, he is likely to underperform, because he never had the talent to be a #1 seed in the first place, he just avoided losing to teams he shouldn't have lost to, and beat some teams he shouldn't have beaten. A #8 seed just might be more talented than Stanford and upset them.

On the other hand, Monty's Final Four team was a 3 seed. Got the benefit of playing an 8 seed in the regional finals, because Kansas crashed in the second round, but beat the #2 in the Sweet 16 partially because Monty was a better game coach than Keady, and lost in OT to the eventual champ Kentucky in the final four.

Neither KenPom nor seedings say, "How good would this team be if they played their best night in and night out," but rather, "how well did they actually play during the season." The coaches who generally get their teams to play the best night in and night out, like a Coach K or a Monty, will tend to get their team overseeded and overrated by KenPom, and thus underachieve in the post-season.

Is this about who underachieves in the post-season, or is it about who overachieves in the regular season? Is it totally skewed for the reasons stated in the second paragraph?

Again, interesting to look at, but be very careful about drawing conclusions.

This is to sure I take website quality seriously

http://adamcwisports.blogspot.com/p/every-possession-counts.html

BEARUPINDCMarch 5, 2019 at 6:45 PM
http://barttorvik.com/cgi-bin/ncaat.cgi?type=coach&sort=1&yrlow=2000&yrhigh=2018
Are you aware that if one clicks on FAQ and then clicks on About Me, one gets "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley. That used to called Rickrolling. Now, you may just be pranking your fans or be a big Astley fan.........

In my experience,
he either gets back to me
1. thanking me
2. saying he meant to have a Astley song insider of a bio
=>it's meant to be funny

or he doesn't get back to me and gets the problem fixed...perhaps someone is pranking him
or he doesn't get back to me and doesn't fix it

At the very least, I tried to help.

I agree with most of that. Clearly, whats being measured is how a team performs in the tourney relative to its regular season performance, not how good of a coach someone is. Kentucky gets "credit" for making a final as an 8 seed when that same team under-performed all season with a ton of talent. Similarly, Cal gets "punished" for the Hawai'i game when injuries obviously were a major factor for it that this data doesn't reflect. So of course there are limitations to what someone should derive from it. And obviously, you're dealing with a lot of small sample sizes in many cases.

That said, I do think there are relevant takeaways. I do believe that tournament coaching is a real thing and some coaches like Roy Williams and Tom Izzo excel at it. Krzyzewski has had 4 first round flame-outs while coaches like Roy Williams and John Calipari have never lost in the first round (once at Memphis for Calipari, but never at Kentucky). For the coaches with a fair amount of data points, I think you can draw some conclusions about how they prep and coach in the tourney. I, for one, would never count out Izzo or Williams in the tournament no matter what their seed is.

I agree this is pretty useless as a measure of coaching per se. Talented, deep teams that underperform in the regular season are the best bet to "overperform" relative to their seed. It may be somewhat useful for filling out brackets, but even that is highly dependent on particulars/matchups.