Green Bay, which is 12-12 this season, currently ranks 239th in KenPom.
Doug Gottlieb, who is 16-40 to begin his tenure as the Phoenix head coach, thinks KenPom’s model is “bullshit.”
During a media availability on Wednesday, Gottlieb railed against the popular model that has been widely cited for years across the college basketball mediasphere. Did his diatribe have anything to do with Green Bay’s ranking at the start of February? Perhaps, but Green Bay is also the fourth-highest-rated team in the Horizon League. It is rated higher than 2 league mates with 14-10 records.
Gottlieb thinks it lacks context.
“Let me help you out with a little soundbite here, OK? KenPom is bullshit, OK, because it takes into account how much you lose by and it has no context for who you have, who the other team has,” Gottlieb said.
“Oakland plays 7 buy games, and so if you get close in those buy games and those teams that you play in a buy game have great years, your numbers go up. We get dinged because … we played Buffalo, it was a hard game, but our team is totally different from when we played Buffalo. … There’s no accounting for that in KenPom.”
Green Bay lost by 43 to Kansas to open the season. Days later, it lost by 7 to Buffalo. A week later, it lost by 19 to St. Thomas.
Both Buffalo and St. Thomas currently sit outside the top 125 in KenPom. Green Bay has also lost to 4 other teams that rank outside the top 200, including the 303rd-place team in the model.
But KenPom’s method of scaling results isn’t unique. The quad win system the NCAA uses to compare NCAA Tournament résumés operates the exact same way. Close losses to wonderful teams don’t look as bad as close losses to ugly teams. If Green Bay had gone on the road and lost to Kansas by 1 or 2 possessions, that result would have been propped up all season long by Gottlieb himself.
Green Bay has played 2 KenPom top-40 teams under Gottlieb. It lost those 2 games by a combined 76 points.
Through his first 2 seasons with the program, Gottlieb has lost 12 games to teams outside KenPom’s top 200.
Maybe the problem isn’t with the model.
Derek Peterson does a bit of everything, not unlike Taysom Hill. He has covered Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Pac-12, and now delivers CFB-wide content.
