Finding Statistics of Opposing Teams

I tried to come up with Alcorn State cards. Honestly, I did. But if you go to their Alcorn State women's basketball website, you will find a link called "statistics", click it and find...nothing. I had nothing to work with.

This left me looking for an opponent similar in strength to Alcorn State. I wanted to find another SWAC opponent, so I chose the next strongest in RPI - Grambling. Unfortunately, Grambling's statistics are a complete mess, with a single player having two or three different lines of stats because the player's name was spelled wrong and wasn't corrected in the databases, leaving two "different" players whose names only differ by a letter.

This is part of the problem with having 340 or so "major league" women's college basketball teams. Some, clearly, are more major than others. Some are "big time" programs like Connecticut and Tennessee, with nationwide fanbases and dedicated websites. Others are at best afterthoughts to comply with Title IX, and are barely recognized on their own small campuses. Most likely, keeping statistics isn't a problem for these schools because no one complained about the stats - no one bothered to look up their stats anyway.

This brought me to the next school, one even lower down than Alcorn State - Jackson State. At least, Jackson State has stats, even though the page has large blue borders on both sides and the black text spills across the page, making it hard to read without highlighting. (I just copied and pasted into notepad.)

There was one problem with Jackson State's stats: there was an Aundrea Woullard and an Aundrea Johnson, who I suspect are actually the same person. Not in my universe, they're not.



Jackson State, however, is a much weaker team than UTEP. Realtimerrpi.com has them ranked at #327 out of #340 teams. The SWAC conference is the weakest conference in women's college basketball, even weaker than the 10 or so remaining women's college basketball independent teams. Therefore, the UTEP stats were adjusted by a factor of 1.1797, their biggest adjustment so far.



This is the first time we can see UTEP's Team Index Points. They get +4 at home and -1 on the road.

I sense that I'm going to win this game. But even if I win it, Jackson State's crappy record (1-6) coming into this game is going to play havoc with my RPI. As it turns out, I made an error in last week's calculation: I lose -0.0024 because my median non-conference rank is in the bottom half of Division I. I misread that as "median conference rank". I stay at #73 on the AP Poll RPI but fall to #89 on the Coaches Poll RPI - the latter gives more weight to the quality of your opponents.

I'll redo the calculations after the next game.