Welcome back, college sports fans, to episode 727, a very special day-before-opening-day basketball treat. Both men’s and women’s teams from Notre Dame (all teams are 0-0/1 today) and Villanova are in the historic city of Rome ready to tipoff the season. The men play at 9:30am (all times Eastern and presumed pm unless otherwise stated) with the women finishing up the double-header at 12:00. We also have a few very sneaky games today beginning with an official 11:59 start, just 60 seconds before the official opening day, when the High Point men face Liberty in Rock Hill, SC (G lived there as a teenager), just south of Charlotte. After that game ends, Grambling takes on N Illinois at 3:00am (yes, 3:00 am), then Merrimack/App St at 6:00, and Queens and Winthrop at 9:00am in the same venue. All night basketball!
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The women are waiting until 10:30 tomorrow morning for their opening day games (the men join in at 11:00am), so look for an Expectation for the hundreds of games before then.
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As we do every season, we are changing a few things in our basketball coverage. While there are no significant mathematical changes, we are planning to have an Expectation that combines both men’s and women’s basketball (and football if there are games that day) every day in which there are games – so every day between today and the end of February (except December 25th). For basketball, we do not publish the spread, primarily because, while Vegas does indeed have betting on basketball (check out the NBA controversies about that subject), we tend to see less…concern about them basketball compared to football. In football, they even talk about it during in-game commentary. For basketball, betting diehards are probably into odds, but at the GCR, we are not. We have never wanted to be viewed as a “gambling” related site and any predictions we make for any sport are strictly for entertainment and a way for geeky-G to do more math and statistics. We thought about adding that feature, but decided it was not worth the effort, especially since we do not predict the spread (although there is a way to guesstimate which we will talk about when we have relevant data). We also don’t list the Vegas favorite (something we are strongly considering for football next year). We did add where to find every game in case our readers have one they’d like to watch (a much more useful stat, in our humble opinion, than whether which team of teenagers a computer calculates should win).
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One last thing. GCR basketball differs a little from GCR football in how we predict games. We’ve been testing that difference in football this season. In football, traditionally, we’ve used a single metric (made up of many factors) to create our predictions. With basketball, we use that metric (roughly) as well as our RPI to predict. Because we don’t give a spread, per se, we use those metrics to limit, for lack of a better word, bad predictions. If one of the metrics calculates Team A will win, but the other suggests Team B, we simply punt (sorry wrong sport) and print “NPre” or No Prediction. It is essentially us saying the game is a pick’em. The NPre also applies if either team has not yet played a game. Like football, GCR basketball has all 365 men’s teams and 363 women’s teams (Citadel and VMI do not have women’s teams) tied for first before any games are played. Every ranking is earned through a combination of performance metrics (did you win or not – although a little more complicated) and strength of schedule metrics (did your opponents – played only, there is no “future” – do well and did your opponents’ opponents do well?) which, when combined, create the Score. The RPI uses similar data but approximates the NCAA RPI calculation – overall simpler than the GCR. We will talk about how to use the two different rankings, which are published weekly in each league’s Evaluation, when we have data to demonstrate.
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But we have basketball in less than 30 minutes so let’s see the tables! First, the men’s games:
| Time | MBB November 1st (All Times Eastern) | Neutral | Conf | Pred | TV |
| 9:30am | Notre Dame (0-0/1) / Villanova (0-0/1) | Y | ACC/BE | NPre | Fox |
| 11:59 | Liberty (0-0/1) / High Point (0-0/1) | Y | USA/BSO | NPre | YouTube |
| Mon 3:00am | Grambling (0-0/1) / N Illinois (0-0/1) | Y | SWAC/HOR | NPre | YouTube |
| Mon 6:00am | Merrimack (0-0/1) / App St (0-0/1) | Y | MAAC/SUN | NPre | YouTube |
| Mon 9:00am | Queens (0-0/1) / Winthrop (0-0/1) | Y | ASUN/BSO | NPre | YouTube |
And then the women’s game:
| Time | WBB November 1st (all times Eastern) | Neutral | Conf | Pred | TV |
| 12:00 | Notre Dame (0-0/1) / Villanova (0-0/1) | Y | ACC/BE | NPre | Fox Sports 1 |
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That’s it for this post. Tune in later this morning for football’s Top 266 after another crazy week of upsets, near misses, blowouts, and, you know, fun! Thank for your continued readership, your insightful suggestions, and each and every time you share our content. We hope everyone had a safe Halloween, JoJo and G.
