Who is Ken Pom? What his college basketball metrics could mean for your bracket
Congrats, your team made the NCAA Tournament field. But where are they in the Ken Pom rankings?
Ken Pomeroy’s name is becoming more and more a part of the mainstream conversation, well, because it’s March.
He started the Ken Pom rankings in 2004 and now writes about college basketball over at The Athletic. But before his name became a bellwether for NCAA Tournament success, he was a government meteorologist for the National Weather Service, based in Utah, according to a New York Times profile.
He quit in 2012 and now sells subscriptions to his statistical knowledge for $19.95 per year. His site is heavy on numbers, so casual fans might not be as keen as sports gamblers or sports analysts who have latched onto Pomeroy’s ranking system.
Think of Ken Pom as a win predictor.
“If you’re looking for a system that rates teams on how ‘good’ their season has been, you’ve come to the wrong place,” Pomeroy writes on the ratings explanation page of his site. “The purpose of this system is to show how strong a team would be if it played tonight, independent of injuries or emotional factors. Since nobody can see every team play all (or even most) of their games, this system is designed to give you a snapshot of a team’s current level of play.”
His ratings system ranks college basketball teams in a long list, which might lead many fans to believe that they’re just one man’s hoops rankings, because maybe he disagrees with this or that Top 25 list. But what he’s measuring is each team’s probability to win an invisible, totally hypothetical game right now. He’s got a formula for calculating things like on-court consistency and even luck, and they’re all woven into his rankings.
On his site, that most important stat is labeled, “AdjEM,” which stands for “adjusted efficiency margin.” Its core is the Pythagorean calculation for expected winning percentage, which was first made famous by baseball statistician Bill James.
Pomeroy’s rubric is constantly undergoing some sort of math-whiz methodology update, though, so make sure you understand what you’re looking at. The site currently defaults to ranking NCAA teams on the basis of this “AdjEM” measure.
College basketball pundits — the ones bringing information to bracket-filler-outers all over the world — turn to his site in order to inform their on-air opinions, too.
“I’ve been a big fan for a long time,” radio host Gary Parrish, a college basketball columnist for CBS Sports, told the Louisville Courier-Journal. “It’s an invaluable resource for anybody who follows college basketball closely and seriously. We’d all be dumber without it.
“… If you use KenPom regularly and check what you think you know or think you’re seeing against it, the site can prevent you from saying or writing or tweeting dumb things,” he continued. “It’s almost irresponsible for somebody in our business to not have a subscription.”