A few years ago I did a similar "DOOMED!!!!" post and then the season promptly turned itself around. I really hope to be just as wrong with this one.
The four columns in the picture below are the difference between how well Marquette was predicted to do and how well they actually did in the every game so far. There's a column for Efficiency, Defensive Efficiency, eFG%, and def eFG%. To understand better, against Winthrop we were predicted to have an efficiency of 110.7 but actually got 133.2 for a positive delta of 22.5.
Each column has been color coded to reflect doing better or worse than expected. In that situation, Winthrop was 22.5 better than expected offensively, but 17.8 worse than expected defensively.
There’s not a lot of green or even upward arrows lately.
How much of this decline can be chalked up to the absence of Otule? Unfortunately, I still don't believe there is a statistically significant relationship between Otule's absence and any of the four columns listed above. Feel free to go here for the additional details. However, the average Pomeroy ranking of opponents was 185 when Otule was on the court, and it is 90 while he's been gone. It's much more likely that MU has stumbled because our competition is getting better.
In fact, even if you look back at even our wins against “so called good teams” or our losses against “good teams”, many are not showing up that way. Somehow, the unbeatable Kohl Center has three home losses for Wisconsin already this year. Washington lost last night to Colorado by 20 points. Norfolk State has some absolute whopper losses to nobody. LSU lost to Coastal Carolina…Vandy has some bad losses. Right now, Marquette probably just isn't that good.
Finally, in case anyone was wondering, there are the predictions for this weekend.
MU Efficiency - 94.9
Syracuse Efficiency - 105.6
MU eFG% - 44.9
MU def eFG% - 49.9
Anyone want to take the under on the defensive eFG%? Yeah, me either.
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