For those of you new here, Week 1 will give you a full breakdown of what we’re doing.

We’re back and as requested I’m going to quickly dive into each archetype with an explanation and some info on methodology. You can skip ahead if that’s not of interest.

Elite: This one feels self explanatory a bit but these are the best of the best teams in the country, with top of the sport strength on both ends of the floor. Numbers wise the cutoffs are relatively the top 8-12 teams each year, give or take, with the idea that the teams that are that good on both sides of the floor are your truly elite overall teams, and the results speak for themselves.

Great: For Great we take a step down, allowing for a little wider threshold but still capturing some of the best teams in the country. There have been years where there are only 1 or 2 Elite teams, with the occasional 0, so in theory the best team in a given year could only fit into the Great archetype. The numbers are relatively similar to Elite early in the tournament, but by the Elite 8/Final 4 we see a big dropoff, which made me feel confident we had drawn a necessary line in the sand.

Solid: Again we widen the net to capture the good teams who still are balanced enough to find fairly reliable results in March, but obviously have a weakness emerging that trips up teams with this makeup far more than the archetypes above them. The lines drawn here, if you were here last week, were clearly some of the trickier to determine, but it started on feel and observation and were refined with backtesting. I feel confident the areas left out align closer with the unreliable Archetype’s than this one.

Strong Enough: You will notice the main difference here is the notch on the chart, where we’ve tightened the screws on a teams strength to be required to be great, in order to makeup for the weakness getting even weaker in this archetype. That change helped strengthen the reliability of this group, suggesting again that as you grow more and more unbalanced, the stronger your strength needs to be to find consistent success in March. As far as the lines to separate Matadors/Grinders, again it was initially chosen on feel and refined from there with backtesting. It usually lies somewhere around the top-50, give or take a few depending on the year.

Matadors: These are the teams that put on a show offensively, but as the saying goes, they play olé defense which is the inspiration for the name. The idea here is simple, they cannot be trusted because while they are very good offensively, to win 4 or 5 or 6 straight games against high quality opponents, you are eventually going to need to get stops and these teams can’t do it reliably. Again, the data agrees, they are not to be trusted. Although that does not mean it is impossible, but a Matador has never (since 2002 when my data begins) won the title so there’s that.

Grinders: Similar to the Matadors this is the group that has a big weakness but is very strong on the other end of the floor. These teams actually struggle even more than Matadors overall, suggesting while defense may win championships it can’t be done without some semblance of reliable scoring. Last year this included St. John’s, many people’s favorite to challenge for a Final 4, who ultimately bowed out in the 2nd round. This entire project began when I started drawing these lines, with the hunch that these teams who are very unbalanced struggled in March. Here we are with strong data to backup what was an initial feeling.

Wannabe: The name here is an ode to the fact these teams all have somewhat of an identity, but it just happens to be inferior to the teams we are deeming reliable. A team like Texas Tech right now for example is much better offensively than defensively, but they aren’t as good as they need to be to make up for their inefficient defense. They wannabe that elite offensive team that can get by with some defensive holes, but it’s just not there. It can happen on the flip side as well, with teams like UNC and Indiana displaying that right now. Even our balanced but not overly special teams in the center like UK or Iowa just don’t have the overall strength to be reliable. The cutoffs were essentially to try and see if hey do these teams just on the outside looking in of our reliable group drop off that heavy? The answer is a resounding yes, but still they do perform a bit better than the truly average teams in Vanilla.

Vanilla: Another pretty self explanatory one here but this is just the leftover archetype where some of the teams may squeak into. Often the fringe of the top-40, but the interesting ones are similar to this year’s Villanova team where they have had success, actually inside the top-30 overall even, but still just overall not consistently good on either end. Not a good track record in March to say the least.

Week 3 Thoughts:

Well, it wouldn’t be right if we didn’t mention the Juggernaut Watch is still in effect as Michigan has done nothing to suggest otherwise since we last met. Now, it’s officially Big Ten season the rest of the way for the Wolverines, so we’ll see if the dominance continues as they travel to some of these tough environments. They currently sit 2nd in Net Eff++ behind only the 2015 UK team that didn’t lose a game until the Final 4 (a loss to the all-time best off eff++ Wisconsin). Next, we have to mention Duke, who stubbed their toe in a loss to Texas Tech and then survived a scare at home to GA Tech after that. Those results were enough to drop them from Elite to Great. A big shift, but with less than half of the overall data points to be collected, we are still going to see bigger shifts after 1 or 2 games until we load up more and more data. By the end of February, results like those won’t move the needle as much because it will be 1 or 2 points in a pool of 30, not 12. Worth noting, as we saw several other big moves like St. John’s falling to unreliable, Purdue rising to Great, and BYU falling to Solid. There will continue to be shifts, but that’s why we’re here, as storylines will continue to develop and then play out. Can Duke recover? Will the shine rub off the Wolverines? Is Vandy as Elite just lipstick on a pig? Are UConn fans going to see the data align with their perception of their team? All questions we will find answers to over the next 2.5 months of ball. Until next week, enjoy the hoops.