I looked back at all NCAA Tournament teams from 2002 – present (all 1,061 of them) to find the teams that are most statistically similar to this year’s OSU team.
I calculated the similarity scores using each team’s KenPom rating, offensive efficiency, and defensive efficiency (all are adjusted for opponent strength). So each of these teams will have a statistical profile similar to the 2017 Cowboys which looks like this:
- KenPom ranking: No. 24 (pretty good)
- Offensive Efficiency: No. 1 (excellent)
- Defensive Efficiency: No. 133 (yuck)
In analyzing this list of teams, the first thing that jumped out at me was that most of them were seeded higher – many of them much higher – than our 10-seed 2017 Cowboys.