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If you want to make sharp March Madness picks, Ken Pomeroy’s college basketball stats are the way to go – if you use them properly at top-rated sportsbooks.
For over 20 years, people who bet on college basketball have flocked to Ken Pomeroy’s famous blue homepage, affectionately known as KenPom, for the best in advanced stats. KenPom was one of the top websites that came out during the Moneyball era of sports betting, when more and more people realized that the same process Billy Beane used to lift the Oakland A’s out of baseball purgatory could be applied to handicapping.
Business at KenPom really took off in 2010 when Pomeroy started releasing his preseason projections for NCAA Division I men’s basketball. The wiseguys used those projections to pounce on some early totals; oddsmakers responded by using the KenPom stats to help craft their over/unders and make them less exploitable.
Fortunately, there’s still enough “recreational” money in the NCAAB betting market for an aspiring sharp to make some coin – especially now that March Madness is back for another year. We’ll show you how to use the KenPom stats to your advantage and turn the Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament into your own personal ATM.
Why Is KenPom Useful?
For the uninitiated, the original concept behind Moneyball was that most people were not very good at recognizing and evaluating talent. Baseball was steeped in tradition; in a world of Jocks vs. Nerds, most people inside the sport were in the Jocks camp.
Ironically enough, baseball is also a numbers game. But people were looking at the wrong numbers, like batting average and pitching wins. The same thing was happening in basketball, with everyone fixated on points, rebounds and assists per game.
Long story short, thanks to Beane’s proof of concept in Oakland, the Nerds are now in charge. Pomeroy’s contribution to basketball was to skirt per-game stats and break things down possession-by-possession, coming up with his own proprietary variant of Bill James’s “Pythagorean” expected win percentages for baseball and building from there.
What Is Adjusted Efficiency Margin?
That would be Pomeroy’s most important stat – at least among those that you can still freely access on his website (others require a subscription). Adjusted efficiency margin, or AdjEM for short, is a number that estimates by how many points a Division I team would outscore an average D-I team over 100 possessions.
When you open the KenPom page, you’ll see all of this year’s 362 D-I teams ranked in order of AdjEM. At the top heading into March Madness: the defending champions and No. 1 overall seeds from UConn, with a plus-32.21 AdjEM. At the bottom: Mississippi Valley State (minus-31.26 AdjEM), who went 1-30 this year.
How Do I Use KenPom’s Stats?
Simply take the two teams who are playing in your target matchup and compare their efficiency margins.
For example, the No. 5 Gonzaga Bulldogs (plus-21.56 AdjEM) are matched up against the No. 12 McNeese State Cowboys this Thursday in the Midwest Region (plus-12.86 AdjEM). Subtract those two numbers, and Gonzaga “should” be 8.7 points better than McNeese over 100 possessions.
Ah, but how many possessions will they actually get on Thursday night? Fortunately for us, Pomeroy’s free stats also include Adjusted tempo (AdjT), estimating the number of possessions each team generates per 40 minutes. Take the average of Gonzaga’s 69.1 AdjT and McNeese’s 65.6 AdjT, which is 67.35, turn that into a percentage, multiply it by 8.7, and you get a projected spread of Gonzaga –5.86 for Thursday’s matchup.
Now all you have to do is compare that quick-and-dirty projection to the actual March Madness odds. And sure enough, the ‘Zags appear to be overvalued as 6.5-point favorites at some sportsbooks. This will come as no surprise to veterans of college hoops; at-large 5-seeds like Gonzaga (26-6 SU, 15-16 ATS) are often vulnerable when they face mid- or low major conference champions in the 12-seed, like McNeese State (30-3 SU, 16-12-1 ATS) coming out of the Southland.
Betting Caution
That doesn’t mean you should automatically bet the house on McNeese. As a general rule, you’d like to see at least a 2-point gap between the Pomeroy projections and the actual college basketball odds before you invest anything larger than a recreational bet.
We don’t even have a 1-point gap in this case. However, if you’re filling out your March Madness bracket, this is one of those tasty 5 vs. 12 matchups that you should consider for your upset specials.
Bet accordingly.
