There are many fundamentals that are stressed in the game of basketball. Box out. Play defense with your feet not with your hands. Follow your shot. Don’t be a diver. But perhaps the most critical of all these is: Make your free throws.
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For the first time since the expansion of the field to 64 teams in 1985, all four #1 seeds advanced to the Final Four. This may come as a surprise. How could it take 24 years for the best four teams to all make it to the semifinals? Well, if we take a closer look at the mathematics behind it, it’s not that strange.
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Every year, there is a great debate about which is the best conference. Some people will look at teams in the top 25, others the out of conference records or how many teams make the NCAA tournament, or any of hundreds of other criteria.

The problem with most of these different criteria is that they are each flawed in some sense. Take, for example, the conference RPI. The ACC has the best overall conference RPI, but that is mostly due to the top two teams. Also, the difference between the top conference and the forth conference in terms of conference RPI is less than .01, hardly a distinguishing number.

It seems as if there is no good way to stay definitively that one conference is better than another other than just watching the teams play, which is too subjective to be used. For this reason, I am not going to partake in this particular debate today. What I will try to do is find the toughest conference.
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People like to generalize (myself included). We enjoy looking at specifics events and trying to find trends. We use small pieces to form the big picture. So, it is not surprising that after the controversial block Patrick Ewing Jr. made against Da’Sean Butler in the final seconds of the West Virginia game, people claimed that the “missed” call meant the Mountaineers were cheated out of a victory. However, there is an obvious flaw to this logic. And it is a matter of sample size.
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Basketball is a game of ratios. Now, I know what you are thinking. “Ratios? Like 3:2? You never see that in a box score.” Well, true. But in mathematics, we define a ratio to be anything of the form x/y, where x and y are integers. And while we don’t usually see ratios in this form, they are all over the box score: 3-33 from the field in the second half. 39-74 from the free throw line. 5-20 from beyond the arc. These are all ratios, and most of the time they materialize themselves as percentages. However, there is one time when we do look at the numbers in the traditional form. And that is the assist-to-turnover ratio.
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We knew it would be hard adjusting to life without Jeff Green. But maybe not this hard. In the Hoyas’ first game of the season, the four returning starters from last year’s deep postseason run - Hibbert, Sapp, Wallace, and Summers - had stellar games, scoring 23, 18, 15, and 10 respectively. But the fifth scorer was nowhere to be found. Austin Freeman was the only other Hoya to make the stats sheet - hitting a baseline jumper 30 minutes into the game - meaning the four returning starters from last year’s team contributed 97% of Georgetown’s total offense. But before anyone starts to panic, let’s take a look back at last year’s season opener.
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This year marks the first time in over a decade that the Georgetown Hoyas are ranked in the top five, in both the AP and ESPN/Coaches Polls. While this is certainly an accomplishment for the program, it is important to realize that no games have been played yet, so the high ranking might be a bit undeserved. Please allow me clarify: I am not saying the Hoyas are not one of the best teams in the country. I am saying that one of the teams in the preseason top five will be lucky to make the Field of 65 by March. Don’t believe me? Let’s look back at the past few seasons.
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As sports fans, we rely a lot on statistics. We talk about free-throw percentage, three-point percentage, field goal percentage. We look at series history, records, and winning streaks. We live by statistics. I, myself, am a mathematician, so I know better than most the importance of numbers. Numbers are our friends. But, sometimes, they can be fair-weather friends.
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