OKC Dave analyzes OSU and Oregon

When I completed the bracketology project here a few weeks ago, I promised I would come back with some analysis after the brackets were announced.

Here I am.

I’m bringing back the scatter plots that I used last time. You want to be in the far northeast corner of these charts…teams with good offense and defense reside in that corner. Defense is on the horizontal axis, offense is on the vertical axis. All of these stats are from kenpom.com.

In order to help you compare teams, every chart in this post aside from the last one uses the same scale: 80 to 112 on defense, 88 to 124 on offense.

First, let’s take a look at how Oregon stacks up against 12 seeds from previous years. I plotted every 12 seed from 2009 to 2013:

Oregon is the green dot. Despite all the fuss about how Oregon was seeded incorrectly, they don’t look completely out of place on this chart. Notably, they have the best defense by a 12 seed in the last five years. But they are also 20 out of 22 teams in offensive efficiency among 12 seeds in this time period. They rank 10 out of 22 in Pomeroy rating in this group.

Now let’s take a look at how OSU stacks up against 5 seeds from 2009 to current:

OSU is the orange dot. Among this group of 20 teams, OSU has the 6^th best defense and the 16^th-best offense. OSU and Oregon are really built the same way – good to great defense with an offense that struggles. OSU’s offensive efficiency is 108.4, which roughly correlates to the 12-13 seed level. Oregon’s is 104.1, which is in the 15-16 seed area. Clearly, defense carries both of these teams. OSU’s overall Pomeroy rating ranks 11^th in this group of 20 teams.

I’ll be back later breaking down each region with scatter plots and looking at the top 20 overall teams.