There is one last order of business to conclude the season and that’s to crown the Champion Ball-Knower of the Year. Before the season, 414 people participated in the second annual H.U.M.A.N. poll, and 356 actually filled out a complete ballot. (If you were one of those, you can see your ballot here.) In all, 19,110 votes were cast.
The usual celebrities and stars participated along with working-class kenpom subscribers. Congratulations to this year’s winner, Brian Kervick. Brian had 40 correct picks and you can see his ballot here, with the final ranking of each team shown:
Brian wins the coveted Ball-Knower Trophy and a free year of kenpom. He comments on the honor:
“I'm incredibly proud of this accomplishment. Likely more than what is rational or reasonable.
I'm a contributing writer to Storrs Central, a media website that spun off of the Bleeding Blue For Good NIL collective. 100% of subscription profit from the site pays NIL deals to UConn athletes (staff is paid by website sponsors/ads).
When I'm not writing, I'm a stay-at-home Dad of 2 girls. I've been a subscriber of your site for at least 12 years (I may have split a login with a buddy for the first couple of years, sorry about that), but I was reading your site for years before you started the subscription model. I own hardcover copies of a couple editions of College Basketball Prospectus. I'm a multi-generation UConn fan. Since childhood, my grandfather has arranged large group bus trips to away Big East games and the Big East tournament he called the Husky Road Crew. When we moved away from Connecticut when I was a kid in the '90s, my Dad got a small DirecTV satellite dish solely in order to get the Full Court NCAA basketball package to watch every UConn game. My daughters root for any team that is currently playing against UConn.
I will cherish and prominently display the trophy.”
Hardcover copies of College Basketball Prospectus?? I did not know these existed. Anyway, I’m glad the decade-plus consumption of my work finally paid off.
Interesting footnote here: Garbage time in a first-round game in the College Basketball Crown may have decided this thing. Boise State poured it on in the final minutes of a 89-59 win over George Washington, which pushed the Revs just below Louisiana Tech in my ratings, allowing Kervick to record one more victory and break what was a tie for first.
In addition to Brian’s award, everyone that finished in the top ten (which is actually 14 people considering ties) gets a free year of kenpom. There are too many to name, and I only have emails anyway, but the most famous of these winners is recently-hired Campbell head coach John Andrzejek. Clearly the biggest honor of the week for him.
As for the group as a whole, the average ballot had 28.7 correct picks, down from 29.2 last season. That could be due to tweaks in the algorithm that generated matchups, a less predictable season, or improved preseason ratings (which are used to generate competitive matchups). We’ll go with the last one.
Actually, it does appear the preseason ratings were the best since I started doing them, at least in terms of the ranking order. But this post isn’t about me, it’s about you! Here’s how both my preseason ratings and a transformed version of the H.U.M.A.N. poll did in predicting my final ratings.
The difference in the r value is smaller than it was last year (.884 for me vs. 859 for you), so there’s evidence that both the voters and my preseason ratings did better than last season. Y’all put UConn at the top of this year’s H.U.M.A.N. poll which is kind of a bummer, but the overall results were useful. Besides, that only makes the humans 0-for-2 in predicting the national champ with their top-ranked team. The AP has now missed 15 times in a row.
Here’s the histogram of ballots by number of correct picks:
As far as the weird teams, these were the teams that voters were the most correct about, based on how often they were picked correctly in a matchup:
Duke 129-22 (85.4%)
Houston 127-23 (84.7%)
Coppin State 21-5 (80.8%)
IU Indy 27-7 (79.4%)
Tennessee 129-35 (78.7%)
And these were the teams people were the most wrong about:
Long Beach State 25-54 (31.6%)
North Alabama 35-61 (36.5%)
Colgate 39-67 (36.8%)
San Diego 29-47 (38.2%)
Mount St. Mary’s 31-50 (38.3%)
For funsies, here was the worst ballot, with a mere 18 correct picks:
This is kind of a brutal ballot but not necessarily because of the choices made. Many of these choices were defensible in October.
That’s a wrap. Thanks to everyone who took the time to fill out a ballot. Be sure to check in at kenpom.com in September for instructions on how to be involved in next season’s H.U.M.A.N. poll. It’s the only way to become the Champion Ball-Knower of the Year.