Welcome to the Matchup Nightmare

This blog isn’t for you.

Don’t get me wrong, you might like it. If you’re half as into college basketball analytics as I am, you might even love it. But it’s not for you.

It’s for me.

You see, I’m an introvert. Not just like the type that’s a little on the quiet side. No. We’re talking, like, I took that online Myers-Briggs test and I scored 99% introvert and 1% extrovert, then I took it again a week later because I forgot to save my results and I got 100/0. That level. I work online from home. I pretty much don’t hang out with people, ever. You get the idea.

I also can’t get enough college basketball. I grew up in Central Illinois and was in seventh grade the year the Illini made it to the title game. That season got me hooked, and I’ve been a junkie ever since. Mix that with my affinity for numbers (my aforementioned online job is as a math teacher and my degree is in math) and it’s almost automatic–stats and analytics are one step short of an obsession.

So what does a guy do when he has way too much to say about a topic and no one to say it to? He starts a blog. Which is why this blog is for me. I need an outlet to talk about college basketball analytics. Whether or not anyone listens is mostly irrelevant. The very first analytical formula I will share with you looks something like this:

No friends + lots of opinions + big enough head to think the opinions matter = blog.

The story of the name

Out of that equation, Matchup Nightmare was born. If you’re wondering–or if you’re not–the name doesn’t really have any significance to me. In my experience with sports blogs, the best names are just a colloquial phrase from the sport. The type of things that announcers like to say. I like the name Matchup Nightmare because in my view it’s one of the most overused phrases in basketball (I’m looking at you, Seth Greenberg). It’s like calling someone a unicorn. It wasn’t that long ago that calling someone a matchup nightmare or a unicorn meant something. LeBron was a matchup nightmare. Dirk was a unicorn. Now those phrases pretty much mean “player who isn’t terrible at scoring.”

Why do I like how overused it is? Well, I actually hate it in real life, but I love that it’s free advertising for my blog. Every time you watch a game you will probably hear the color commentator unknowingly reference the name of my blog. I’m just kind of assuming that the free publicity will lead to me becoming big time and eventual world domination.

What to expect from me

All joking aside, I’m not big time, and I’m probably never going to be. If you’re looking for true analytics savants, go check out the work of Ken Pomeroy, John Gasaway, Bart Torvik or Dean Oliver. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that in order to get people to read your stuff it has to be unique. It has to provide them with something they can’t find anywhere else. Those guys and others have done so much extensive work that realistically there isn’t much I can give you that you couldn’t already get from them.

That’s not even to mention my data constraints. I have more data than the average college basketball fan, but there is a limit to my programming skills and my wallet size, both of which inhibit the data I can get. That relationship looks something like what is shown below. (What better way to share my first graph with you than by using arbitrary and meaningless units on both axes?)

Most notably this puts a cap on play by play data. Maybe someday. For now, I’ll make do with what’s available from the free/cheap sources that don’t need to be coded.

The one advantage I do have on the famous guys, however, is that I’m accessible. There was a time when Ken Pomeroy was still unknown enough that he responded to my email. Now his name is virtually synonymous with NCAA men’s analytics, and good luck getting a reply from him. I often think of studies I would love to ask him to do, but again, I don’t exactly have him on speed dial.

If you ever have those curious moments like I do, feel free to ask me! Chances are I won’t be able to do the same level of cool analysis as the big guns, but at least you know I’ll respond!

Other places to find me

On this blog I will be mostly sticking to men’s college basketball, but if you are interested in either NCAAW or the WNBA (and you should be) then go check out the website I recently started volunteering for: Her Hoop Stats. My involvement there is in almost as early of stages as this blog is, so I’ll dedicate a separate post to it later on. For now, you can follow me on Twitter or Instagram. I don’t post a bunch of interesting stuff there yet, but maybe I will if I get really motivated.

I think the biggest takeaway is that I am not writing this for you, I don’t have access to tons of fun data, I don’t have great programming skills and I don’t post cool things on social media. Have I convinced you not to follow me yet? If not, then welcome to the Matchup Nightmare!