Pitarresi: SU trashes the PPI

The Pitarresi Power Index got blown up Wednesday.

 

The PPI is my own basketball and football power rating system that I half-seriously use to try to predict the outcome of games. Except when it works. Then I’m very serious about it and brag to people how the PPI had predicted a win or a loss.

 

It’s based mostly on statistical information, plus a little tweaking and intuition, with strength of schedule, injuries, road and home sites and trends mixed in. You can’t employ it until approximately halfway through a season, when enough games have been played to make it somewhat legitimate.

 

If it is legitimate at all. Sometimes it works. I will say, however, that it does give me some idea of relative strengths. And I think if I ranked all 16 Big East basketball teams according to their PPI, the list would look very much like the current standings.

 

Only it didn’t work Wednesday for the Syracuse-West Virginia game. At all.

 

In the PPI, the lower the number, the better the team. WVU had a PPI of 119 going into Wednesday’s game. SU had a PPI of 137. The way I do things, that made the Mountaineers nine points better, all things being equal. However, SU was playing at home and maybe has played a tougher schedule, good for maybe five points. That was cancelled out because SU’s Arinze Onuaku was hobbled. WVU’s point guard, Joe Marzullo, was hurt, though, which meant the Orange got those points back. So, WVU should still have been four points better.

 

Well, they weren’t. SU, playing its best defensive game of the season, had things in hand most of the way and won 74-61. The PPI failed miserably, probably because there was no way to know that the Orange would suddenly get a huge fire under their defensive butts.

 

The PPI might need a little retooling.