Tuesday Open Thread: OSU-Purdue and Kentucky-Florida

Good evening sports fans. Tonight we have a couple beautiful matchups as Ohio State and Purdue tangle in a Big 10 battle, and then the SEC’s marquee rivalry takes place with Kentucky visiting Gainesville.

Purdue is rated 7th in the Pomeroy ratings, and have an 82% chance of beating Ohio State tonight. Ohio State is rated just 25th in the Pomeroy ratings, but remember they garnered said rating without the services of Evan Turner for a few weeks. If he is close to full strength, I actually like the Buckeyes to go on the road and take down Purdue.

In the nightcap, Kentucky travels to their first road test. Given that they struggled in their first SEC road game at Georgia, this should be no picnic for them. Freshman DaMarcus Cousins is really coming into his own, as he is probably the best rebounder in the entire country. He still is taking tons of shots though, ending more possessions than any other player in the country.

Although Florida is a pretty good team in their own right, especially defensively, they will likely need a ton of threes to beat the Wildcats. Given that they shoot just over 30% on the season, I’m taking Kentucky.

A TFS Analysis: Kansas State

Kansas State was supposed to be a bottom of the barrel Big 12 team this year, but they have rocketed to an 11-2 start, narrowly losing their Big 12 opener to Missouri.

Kansas State makes their living in one big way: offensive rebounding. This year Kansas State is rebounding 42.5% of their misses, which is 4th best in the country. Over the past three years, they have been ranked 4th, 1st and 2nd. Just to make sure they aren’t making their living rebounding extremely well against bad teams, then disappearing against the good ones, I looked up their numbers against teams with good post players from the last two years.

Basically this chart was a lot of work to say that for the most part, especially last season, K State held their own against the best rebounding teams they played. Before you go overboard saying that they only outperformed their season long stat 3 times (ironically, twice against a national champion), that is to be expected. It’s natural for the team to beef up their numbers against bad teams, and thus suffer a bit against good teams, even if they rebounded well. So, this is a roundabout way of saying that Kansas State’s offensive rebounding numbers are for real, and you can expect them to be just as good this season.

Despite Contrary Reports, Sooners Good at Basketball

It’s pretty well known that I’m not a huge Big 12 fan.  Mostly because of football and the traitorous Bill Self.  But when I looked at KenPom last night after the Bedlam game and saw that Oklahoma was ranked 28th in the country in offensive turnover efficiency and then started looking at some of their main contributors I must say…

The Big 12 is pretty fucking good at basketball.