Ross Hodge Explains Why Metrics Favor UCF Over WVU Basketball

WVU basketball will look to bounce back after an extended break when it travels to play UCF on Saturday.

With the same Big 12 record at 6-5, the two teams have very similar resumes this season. However, UCF sits 12 spots above WVU in the KenPom rankings and 13 spots higher in NET.

In a press conference on Thursday afternoon, head coach Ross Hodge gave his thoughts of why UCF has such a lead on WVU in the metrics, citing point differentials outside of just wins and losses.

“We beat Campbell by eight instead of beating them by 16, we dropped 11 spots in KenPom that night. We go get beat really, really bad at Arizona, And we didn’t drop one spot in KenPom,” Hodge said. “The way that Kenpom is just, again, it’s data driven, it’s metric driven and it does reward you for beating a team badly if you can, and it doesn’t always for just if you won the game or you lost the game… But if you’re supposed to beat a team by 15 or 20 and you beat them by 10, you’re gonna drop in the metrics.”

All of the players who scored for the Knights last season left the program in the offseason. After assembling a roster that has meshed well this season, Hodge commended the UCF staff for their work.

“There’s like the gift and then there’s the curse. The gift can be that you can assemble a group of guys together when everybody, you know, the outside world may have left them, left them for dead, and they’re not gonna be very good. And then he put this group together and it’s worked very well for them this year. And they had a great schedule and they took, took advantage of it and they position themselves well,” Hodge said.

Roster construction is also a point Hodge mentioned as a contributor for the metrics, as KenPom factors previous experience for players when grading teams.

“KenPom also relies on historical data from the previous teams or previous players… if you had a JUCO player that is a very good player for you, he’s gonna have no historical KenPom data. He won’t factor into that at all, whereas if a player was a very efficient player at a Division I, so some of it, you do have to start somewhere,” Hodge added.

WVU basketball will take the court against UCF at 6 p.m. on Saturday.

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