It's Pomeroy day!

Anyone who has read this site during the basketball season knows that I am a big fan of kenpom.com, the college basketball statistics site. Pomeroy has a variety of his own metrics, but even for the more conventional tempo free statistics, his site is second to none because of its simplicity and sortability. As of last season, it is a premium site, but $19.95 per year is a bargain for the number of times I visit in during the course of the college basketball season. During the season, I probably will act as if everyone has access to it. Because you should.

In any event, Pomeroy's preseason projections are now live on the site. The quick news: IU ranks #3 in Pomeroy's ratings, behind Kentucky and Ohio State. IU is #1 in projected offensive efficiency and #15 in projected defensive efficiency. Pomeroy currently has IU favored in 27 of its 30 games (road trips to Ohio State, Michigan, and Michigan State are the exceptions) and projects a 24-6/13-5 record. If that is a source of confusion (i.e., the numbers don't add up) Pomeroy's overall record assumes that teams will sometimes lose games in which they are favored and win games they aren't favored to win. In other words, even if IU a team has a better than 50 percent chance of winning each individual game, that doesn't mean they have a more-likely-than-not chance to go undefeated.