Boy are we spoiled

This Bill Self's 21st year. I have posted this data before but it never gets old. There are a lot of ways you can measure the success of a coach and a program. We all know he has 2 Natty's and that is pretty stinking huge. It puts him in very rarified air. But I am going to focus on 2 stats here. Both are measures of not only the degree of success but the consistency of success.

First up is the AP top 25. The table below shows the data for the last 20 years since Self came to Kansas. The first colum is the number of weeks KU has been in the polls in the last 20 years. There have been 382 total polls. You can see KU has been in 357. Only Duke has been in more and only barely. But in third is Gonzaga and they are way back with UNC even further back. The level of consistent success is amazing. The second column is the total points where you get 25 points for being ranked 1st, 24 for 2nd, 23 for third and so forth. Again KU is 2nd to Duke. But I would argue that Duke has often got the benefit of the doubt in their position in the polls. Nonetheless, Duke and KU are in another stratosphere compered to everyone else. I mean it isn;t even close. KU has averaged being ranked 6.7 in the polls. Again only Duke is better. But KU and Duke are simply the only 2 schools that can be considered top-tier consistency.



The second stat is even more impressive for Self and considerably so. This takes a wee bit of explanation. I took the schedules of every school since 2004 and calculated what the median school would in terms of wins and losses. So in other words, if the coach ranked roughly 178th or so played the same schedule how many wins would they have. Then I subtracted that from the actual wins each coach had. This results in the net wins above average for each coach. Once again it is Self and Coach K on top. But when it comes to winning games, Self is the king. I have shown before that KU has the toughest collective schedule since 2004. And for instance, it is not really fair to compare Mark Few's 573 wins to Bill Self's 577 because Self has played a much much tougher schedule overall. I mean Mark Few's numbers are amazingly imporessive but they do not compare to Bill Self when normalized to SOS. Bill Self is just in a league of his own. Even compared to Coach K Self rises to the top. You can see that Self has won 2.14 times as many games as the median team would have won. Coach K is a very respectable 2.08. But then it drops off a ton to Roy Williams at 1.97. Bo Ryan (1.87), John Calipari (1.86), Jay Wright (1.82) and Tom Izzo (1.80) deserve mention but they are simply not even close to Self.

We truly are spoiled. Bill Self has made KU basketball the elite of the elite where it counts, winning games.

This does show how spoiled we are. Another one of my favorite analysis you have done is showing HCBS amazing record in close games. I think the perception that the HCBS Jayhawks under perform in the NCAA post season is because he gets more wins all the time than what that talent level would get from anyone else. That is what it seems like to me.

I am impressed you remember that stat hairy. That also is my favorite stat. Although it is a wee bit complicated and a little tough to easily explain, it is a tremendous measure of the actual game-coaching ability of a coach. It is not exactly how they preform in close games but your drift is sort of right. It is actually calculated by dividing the actual number of games a coach has won by the projected games he should have won based on the probability. So it is not just close games but all games, but the close games are where the big difference come in. Of all the coaches who have won 500 or more games since 1950 (55 total coaches) Bill Self places 2nd in this stat, Behind only the great Lou Carnaseca. Obviously this list is a who's who of the coaching world. You pretty much have to be above 1.02 in this stat or you don't stay coaching for long. Just for clarification, the sum for all coaches is 1.000. For every coach that wins above probability someone has to lose. Those coaches end up having short careers. On this list of 55, only Hugh Durham is below 1.00. Most are at 1.02 or above. Coach K is at 1.044. Bob Knight, 1.059, Dean Smith 1.075 and Roy Williams 1.058. But Self is at 1.08. Just simply amazing. BTW, this is the stat I used to claim that Porter Moser was a very bad hire. He is at 0.97 and his time at OU has been slightly worse. This is really a great stat.