Preface: I am not allowed to compete in any office pools known to me personally. Wife’s clinic…nope multiple years in a row. She gets one, they know it’s me, they aren’t happy. It’s a race for second year in and year out. I lost one a few years back when all the top seeds went down. A random travel nurse won picking on the cat scale. Scary cats trump regular cats trump everything else. Mike Leach approves.
I love college basketball. I love college basketball more than football. IN FACT I ran bracket pools in college. Multiple coax cables run to the living room (early 2000s), big tube TVs, bribe the cable guy, into the DirecTV era of glory. I worked at a DirecTV call center which could issue that card you put in the box…ALL the channels. We had over a hundred brackets taped to the walls. School wasn’t even optional. If you were in … you were at my place. Checking brackets, trying to change yours without someone noticing. It was an event. Winner take all. Ties resulted in whatever we decided the game would be, usually really really dumb college guy stuff. Glory.
So why do you do it CB? Why not put it behind a paywall?
Because I love you. That’s why. Also that would really really mess up my taxes. See I’m a 1099 Oilman, proprietor of my own company, and a crypto enthusiast. By the time I get all of my paperwork done, Claude bots working, profits laundered through various offshore Cayman accounts, and pay the accountant it’s basically nothing. Hell, my bookie had a heart attack last year and now I got a lot of explaining to do with my accountant. You know how long it took that guy to learn how to get coin off the blockchain?
Now I bring your attention to the most important metric I have run across in my research endeavors found within KenPom, the almighty AEM. Given the state of NIL arms races throughout the college landscape we will once again see a top heavy field advance. Some are hidden in plain sight…do not count out TexasTech and the like, who’ve experienced setback injuries early in the year. That’s just an edge you can play based on seeding. We are ball knowers, we live to exploit those edges.
Will chaos happen. Yes. Will you lose a bet or two. Will we parlay things we shouldn’t?
Are we ok with this? Of course.
AEM
What does it mean CB????
I’ll tell ya…
AI says “Adjusted Efficiency Margin (AEM or AdjEM) is a premier KenPom college basketball metric representing the points a team outscores an average opponent per 100 possessions, adjusted for opponent strength. It is calculated as Adjusted Offensive Efficiency minus Adjusted Defensive Efficiency. AEM is key for ranking teams and projecting tournament success, as most champions rank high in this metric.”
It means schools with more money are gonna win games. The AEM metrics have teams at the top more separated from the field than ever before. The highest AEM last year was
Duke +38.9 highest ever going into Tourney
Arizona +37.66
Michigan +37.5
Florida +33.79
I thought about going game by game for breakdowns. I’m in the middle of a leasing push kids. Head over to War Blogle’s Discord. I’ve sat down to type this two nights in a row, fell asleep both times. If we need to pivot we pivot. It will all be discussed there.
Good luck. Send me those parlays on X. Hell, I might name a well after you. Oh, and here’s my bracket. And join Blogle’s Bracket Challenge.
