Charitable Interpretation
What can college basketball's newest trend tell us about the season to come?
Just days after posting an article on the future of the Big West, the Sacramento State circus led by Shaquille O’Neal and Mike Bibby announced they would be joining the conference in 2026-27.
Mere minutes after Halves Not Quarters excoriated Kansas for not adding enough three-point shooting to their upcoming roster, 4-star recruit and deadeye three point shooter Kohl Rosario reclassified for the 2025-26 season and promptly committed to the Jayhawks. Making matters worse, highly recruited international big man Paul Mbiya also committed to Kansas after I had scrapped a section dedicated to international recruits that could help the Jayhawks. Oh well. Mbiya can’t shoot, and my best source on international recruiting doesn’t think he’s all that, in general.
So, with the current inability to time stories in mind, I wanted to undertake a bit more of a retrospective and revisit one of my classic data pieces from summers yore.
Classified Clashes
In 2023, I decided to take a deep dive into “secret scrimmages”, a time-honored tradition where teams play closed-door, rules-modified “games” against other Division I opponents before the season starts and leak the score to the press if they win. While easily deridable for their questionable applicability in estimating the relative strength of the teams, they’re some of the first morsels fans receive as to how their squad is shaping up. The Golden Rule of Sports applies here: if we won, it matters, and if we lose, we weren’t trying.
Ennui Exhibitions
Traditionally, exhibition games were yawning affairs where big time programs would shake the cobwebs against a local D2 school prior to shaking the cobwebs against a terrible D1 school the next week in their season opener. I’m no expert on college basketball history, but this status quo seems to have been first prodded in the postwar era by teams seeking to hold charity exhibitions against “real” opponents to raise money in the wake of Hurricane Florence in 2018. While a small number of these games have been played in the years since for various causes, both catastrophic and constant, things really seemed to ramp up last season with some 41 charity exhibitions logged by HoopsHD. (The lack of comparable listings for previous seasons gives some indication as to the newfound prevalence of these events.) The NCAA gave the full green light to this new system in January, easing regulations and paving the way for teams to play multiple D1 exhibitions, even allowing teams to take money for themselves rather than hungry children and their ilk.
Unlike the secret scrimmages of the past and the present, tickets are sold for charity exhibitions, cameras are mounted high in the gantry for a viewing audience, regulation basketball rules are followed mostly to the letter, and teams have at least some amount of public scrutiny on their performance. Most of the reasons typically given for the irrelevance of secret scrimmages’ outcomes on future team performance have been ameliorated, save for the unavoidable roadblock that the games don’t count or the general assertions of early season instability that I’ve previously challenged.
With that in mind, do charity exhibitions provide a decent sense of how each team stacks up? Or, at the very least, a better idea than the secret scrimmages of old?
Does Anything?
Of course, to figure that out, we must have some idea of how useful any game is in that regard. In my first analysis of secret scrimmages (which was somewhat bizarrely themed after the movie Oppenheimer), I reached the conclusion that secret scrimmages were as legitimate as conference games because a roughly equivalent amount of the scrimmages and conference games saw the winner match the higher-ranked team in KenPom at season’s end. The obvious flaw in this methodology is that predicting a two point win is much more similar to predicting a two point loss than it is to predicting a 40-point win. With this in mind, I drilled down to the raw adjusted efficiency margins that give specific predictions based on the final KenPom rankings for this past season, adjusted for each team’s home court advantage where necessary. The average “error” in these predictions provide a better sense of accuracy than simply nailing the winner. For a more interesting stat than average error, I tracked how many of the margins fell within +-5 points of where the algorithm thought they would land, ample wiggle room necessary given the natural variance of things like three pointers, free throws made, and bad food the night prior.
The Non-Con
Old-school, college basketball purists love to handwave early season success with “we’ll see how that works during conference games in mid-February.” The conference slate is seen as more legitimate than early season non-conference games where teams are “finding their footing,” “messing with rotations,” and “trying different things,” with margins of victory against lesser competition seen as an irrelevant outcome more reflective of coaching instruction on running up the score than relative strength. Once again, if you won by a lot, you’re really good, and if you didn’t, well, you weren’t really trying. It’s called sportsmanship.
Non-Conference Tournaments
Non-conference tournaments are given even less credence, as the back-to-back games, strange venues, and general holiday atmosphere give these bouts a reputation for wild unpredictability. With this in mind, a general hierarchy of expected performance can be constructed; conference games reflect true strength the most, followed by non-conference games, then wacky non-conference tournaments, and finally, charity exhibitions just above the secret scrimmages that no one takes seriously.
Seeing Results
For all of the unction that the uncs hold about the all-revealing nature of conference play, for all of the assertions that uneven non-conference games are pseudo-random blowouts, teams play closer to their overall performance during the noncon than in conference games. This could be influenced by the cross-conference games holding more weight in determining relative conference strength and thus the overall rankings, but this remains a dramatic reversal of college basketball’s received wisdom on where teams match their true strength.
Uncharitably Unusual
For all of the reasons that charity exhibitions should be a closer simulation of a real game than a closed-doors scrimmage, the secret scrimmages outperformed charity exhibitions in matching final outcomes by nearly 10%. Secret scrimmages don’t appear to be quite the comparable datapoints to conference games as my previous piece may have implied, but the idea that this is a result of failure to simulate game conditions doesn’t seem to be true based on the lesser performance of the charity exhibitions.
Tournament Troubles
Indeed, the real losers of this comparison don’t seem to be the secret scrimmages or the charity exhibitions, but rather the non-conference tournaments. Playing in ballrooms, Bahamas, or 90% empty, neutral-site gyms on short rest over holiday weekends seems to result in even stranger results than preseason matchups with nothing on the line. Anecdotally, my paper trading simulation of college basketball gambling has lost money three years in a row during this tumultuous period: weird things seem to happen as more and more college basketball games are played closer to the Bermuda Triangle.
Those tournaments might not be around for long. The Player’s Era Festival, a cash-prize, non-bracketed event in a sterile Las Vegas arena, continues to hoover up top teams from the exotic, winner-move-up tournaments by offering the simple promise of cold, hard cash for the players and the programs. While I love the random tournaments with their video-game-level settings and the high-stakes feel of bracketed play, it’s become clear that this is the direction that early season college basketball is headed. Maybe, more consistent performances from the top teams can be some kind of silver lining for this cultural loss. I’d rather have Moncton, New Brunswick and this incredible logo instead.
As fate would have it, the NCAA made a substantial change to the season schedule during the production of this piece, paving the way for an NBA-like schedule sometime in the near future. Not only does that change the calculus regarding whether these preseason exhibitions will be necessary, but potentially devalues the regular season of the sport entirely when paired with the imminent NCAA Tournament expansion being force-fed to fans. I guess this article, like other recent Halves Not Quarters, might not end up being quite so timely. Thankfully, just like when your team loses a charity exhibition, it doesn’t even matter, and we weren’t actually trying.
