… it’s mostly Pomeroy. LSU is ranked only #40 by Pomeroy. Compare that to UK at #26.

LSU has had a very favorable SEC schedule. That isn’t saying they aren’t a good team, you don’t sweep teams like Ole Miss and MSU (UK couldn’t beat either one) and not be a good team.

LSU is solid offensively and defensively, but not great either way. They do a lot of good things, but they don’t do anything particularly well, and since Pomeroy is a major component of my rankings, they just can’t quite get there yet. I have LSU currently ranked 33 and Kentucky at 40.

… is just a mystery to me. If I ranked WVU where my system sticks it, they would be a top 10 team. I modify them more than any other team every single week.

WVU has the 5th best defense in the nation, statically, and the 31st best offense. If you look at their schedule, you see that they almost never lose to teams they should beat, and they play the sixth toughest schedule in the land. What makes them so efficient is their terrific offensive rebounding. They get almost 40% of their misses off the glass. They also take great care of the ball, turning it over less than 18% of the time, while forcing their opponents into 25% turnovers. They don’t shoot the ball well, but they defend the three so well that they hold teams to an outrageous 27% from the arc. All this against one of the toughest schedules in the nation.

What helps them in the computer rankings (Sagarin) is their scoring margin. They have beaten the crap out of a lot of teams this year by >15 points, and that really gives them a boost in the predictor computer ratings, which is a component of Sagarin.

It isn’t just the computer rankings, it is their actual statistics that make them look so incredibly impressive against their record. It is a very strange kind of thing you rarely see in college basketball, I guess. I look at this as a good test of Pomeroy’s system, and it figures prominently in my analysis (and that of many other voters).