While most MAC basketball fans were watching the craziest day in NCAA history yesterday, EMU fans have been looking forward to today, when the women's basketball team will take on the #25 South Carolina Gamecocks.

This game presents an interesting matchup of contrasting styles. Although Tavelyn James is excellent from three-point range, EMU is usually best in a fast game where they can force a lot of turnovers and score easy baskets in transition. The Gamecocks, on the other hand, are what a better-shooting version of the EMU men's basketball team might look like, preferring to keep things slow and deliberate, in the half-court.

Continue reading this post »

Wherein I estimate the likelihood of each team winning the tournament, consider how this has been changed by the new tournament format, and investigate the case of apparently mis-seeded teams.

On Friday we used Log5 to estimate the likelihood of each team winning the MAC women's tournament, and also to compare the new tournament format to the old format. This morning we'll take a look at the men's tournament, but with an added twist.

In addition to using actual winning percentages, we'll also take a look at Pythagorean win percentages -- another Bill James invention -- which use scoring margins (or some derivative, such as tempo-free scoring margins) over the season to create "expected" win percentages. In this case, I've used the Pythagorean win percentages calculated by Ken Pomeroy, using 10.25 as the exponent.

Continue reading this post »

Wherein I estimate the likelihood of each team winning the tournament, consider how this has been changed by the new tournament format, and discover an oddity.

One of the simpler methods for calculating game outcome probabilities (and thereby estimating tournament outcomes) is log5, which comes from Bill James' sabermetrics. Even though the only factors that go in to log5 are the winning percentages of the teams, it tends to give reasonably accurate probabilities. This can be improved by using pythagorean win percentages, which use scoring margins over the season to create "expected" win percentages, and I might go that route for the men's tournament (because there are plenty of sites that have already calculated pythagorean win percentages for men's basketball), but I think actual win percentages will give us a good approximation here. If you want to learn more about log5, here's the theoretical justification, and here's the history.

So what does log5 have to tell us about the MAC tournament? Find out, past the jump.

Continue reading this post »

Who ever thought we'd see the day when EMU fans would be sad for the end of football season?

That day is here, and a men's basketball home opener Friday night coupled with football's final home game Saturday provides an easy comparison between the two programs. While the football team finally seems to be on the upswing after 15 consecutive losing seasons, the men's basketball team is, if not at rock-bottom, probaly somewhere in the neighborhood.

Continue reading this post »

It's a cliché to write that EMU and Michigan, despite being just seven miles apart -- among FBS teams, only Rice and Houston are closer -- exist in different worlds, but there's usually a reason for clichés: they're true.

The University of Michigan, founded in Detroit as the "Catholepistemiad", or "University of Michigania", about 20 years before the Michigan Territory officially became a state, is a prestigious academic institution widely considered a "public ivy". Eastern Michigan University, was founded 32 years later as a normal school (Michigan State Normal School, to be precise), which is how most MAC schools got their start.

Among normal schools, EMU has a long and rich tradition, but it's nothing to rival the University of Michigan. Likewise in sports. Michigan was one of the earliest western schools to field a football team, starting play in 1879, just 10 years after Rutgers and Princeton played the first intercollegiate football game. In the 1880s they were consistently competing with then-elite programs like Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and Princeton, in 1887 Michigan introduced football to the University of Notre Dame, and by the time James Swift brought "scientific football" to Ypsilanti in 1891, the sport was well-established in Ann Arbor.

Continue reading this post »

All I can figure is that, after going two years with no games against Football Championship Subdivision teams, Eastern Michigan athletic director Derrick Gragg decided it was time to double up.

Either that, or somebody with some pull wanted to see some great HBCU marching bands. The Howard University "Showtime" Marching Band was the best-sounding collegiate marching band I've ever heard (and person-for-person, the loudest), and I hear good things about the "Mighty Marching Hornets".

These games certainly don't make financial sense -- even if they sold out Rynearson Stadium, EMU would lose money on each -- they don't make for good football games, and they don't help the Eagles win the MAC or get into a bowl.

Continue reading this post »

Less than 36 hours remain until EMU's 2011 football season kicks off, and at last the Eagles will have the chance to put some distance between themselves and the stink of 71-3. It's been 1009 days since the home crowd at Rynearson Stadium witnessed a win, but tomorrow, barring a catastrophe, it will happen.

Howard has had a very bad football team the last several years. Just how bad have they been? In 2010, they went 1-10, with the sole win coming over Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, whose football team just moved up to Division II in 2009. That wasn't a single-season fluke, either; in the past three seasons they've managed just three Division I wins.

Continue reading this post »

Now that summer is winding down, football season winds up. While NFLers were negotiating, college programs have been practicing and filing down their depth charts in preparation for Labor Day weekend when the season begins. The weather outside is heating up and that must mean it's time for us to begin previewing the MAC, one team at a time...

Located seven miles east of Ann Arbor and generally deep in the shadows of the University of Michigan, Eastern Michigan University has a long, but often ignored, tradition of athletic success in almost every sport except football. Actually, the school does have a tradition of football success too, you just have to dig through old records to find it...

Continue reading this post »

 Whether it's football or basketball, MAC fans love to talk about attendance. In particular, we love to worry and whine about how bad our team's attendance is.

One of the most popular posts on my Eastern Michigan blog has been a chart showing football attendance for the last three years (2007-09). I thought I'd offer an updated version of that chart here, adding the reported 2010 attendance.

Continue reading this post »

According to an article in today's Wall Street Journal, "there are 17 schools with major athletic departments (whose football teams compete in the Football Bowl Subdivision) that have never been found guilty of any major violation in any sport since 1953, when the NCAA began tracking rule violations." The Mid-American Conference is singled out for special attention, with five such programs, more than any other conference. Kudos to Bowling Green, Central Michigan, Kent State, OHIO™, and Western Michigan for running clean programs -- or at least not getting busted -- for the last 57 years!

Continue reading this post »

...just outside Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Wait, what?

In day 1 day 2 the quarterfinal round of the MAC women's basketball tournament, which is being played near the eastern end of the conference, in Cleveland, the center of power in the conference is clearly in the west. When the day began, three West Division teams were in contention against five teams from the East Division. By the time the final whistle of the day was blown, three West Division teams remained, with only Bowling Green remaining to represent the East.

Continue reading this post »