MU currently 337th nationally in kenpom 'luck'

Posted on: December 4, 2019 at 11:19:11 CT

Luck is a measure of the deviation between a team’s actual winning percentage and what one would expect from its game-by-game efficiencies. ”Lucky" teams win more games than you'd expect them to based on their statistical profile and "unlucky" teams lose more than you'd expect. This is essentially a measure of the difference between a team's actual record, versus what Kenpom's rankings would predict their record would be, and he calls teams that overperform his predictions to be "lucky" and teams that underperform "unlucky". It basically represents the difference between his model and what actually happens.

It has always been my opinion that 'luck' in that case is mostly just a way of measuring coaching. For the most part that correlates very strongly to seasons we got good coaching and seasons we got poor coaching. Kenpom basically has a statistical model that predicts outcomes based on production and statistical outputs, but coaching impact is the hard to define aspect that gets rolled up as luck.