That Got Weird, Fast. And Yet, So Slow…

Building projections is fun, especially when the numbers hit. But when things go wrong? Let’s just call it a different kind of fun — the kind where you take your hands off the keyboard and throw them up in the air because none of the numbers land as expected. Texas Tech vs. Michigan State was that kind of fun.

March Madness occasionally turns out an outlier game of epic proportions (just ask Virginia last year), and the Spartans vs. the Red Raiders offered a leading candidate for this year’s wacky anomaly. There are a lot of ways to slice how exceptional this game was for these two teams and in the men’s tournament in general, but we’re going to dig in using one of our pre-game predictions as a wedge.

Knowing that both Texas Tech and Michigan State play relatively slow games (ranked 249th and 189th slowest in the NCAA), and neither team relies much on their three-point game (ranked 284th and 211th, respectively, on three-point shot attempts), we focused on two-point attempts instead. We estimated a combined 69 attempts, with a probability of 71.1% that we’d see at least 64. We saw 51.

The absurdly low numbers get even lower and more absurd from there.

If you managed to stay awake during this slogfest, congratulations. There were only 117 possessions — we had estimated 130. You don’t need a fancy SQL query to figure out that that means there were fewer than 60 possessions per team — an astoundingly low number. To put it in perspective, Virginia is the slowest paced team in the NCAA and even they average 60 possessions per game. This semifinal was slower than Virginia playing itself.

Few possessions plus potent defenses yields pretty low scores. The first half ended with a nadir of 23–21 — the lowest scoring Final Four first half in 19 years (Wisconsin vs. Michigan State in 2000 holds that record: 19 to 17). For more perspective on how unexpected this was, Vegas odds listed the first half total at 62. It came in at 44. And while the game picked up a bit in the second half, the numbers were still way off the mark for everyone predicting on this sort of thing: Vegas had the game total at 133 with Michigan State favored by 2.5; we had the game total at 137 with Michigan State favored by 3; the final combined score was 111 and Texas Tech won 61–51. Vegas almost never misses this big. (FiveThirtyEight had Michigan State at 54% win probability, and ESPN’s BPI had Michigan State at 61.1% win probability.)

The potential for slow pace and low score were there, of course — both teams are strong on defense. But the perfect storm (or calm) of Saturday night had more to do with Michigan State’s offensive meltdown than anything else. Coming into the game Michigan State was ranked fourth in the NCAA in offensive efficiency. They also had the second highest effective FG percentage (58.8%), and were shooting 48.8% from the field. But they finished the game shooting 31.9%.

One problem was turning the ball over (which becomes a much bigger issue in a game with fewer possessions), but the more noteworthy source of their troubles might have been their lack of assists. The Spartans are third in the NCAA in assists, with 18.6 per game. On Saturday, they had six.

You might imagine that a team that isn’t able to connect from the field (nor with their teammates) might start taking more three-point shots. And that’s what Michigan State did — going 7 for 24 behind the arc. It may not seem like much — 24 attempts on the night instead of their season average of 21.5 doesn’t sound too outlandish — but it was enough to put them close to the 75th percentile.

Meanwhile, Texas Tech found itself in a somewhat similar situation when faced with Michigan State’s defense. They also attempted near the 75th percentile of their three-point average compared to the season. But where the Spartans only made 29% of their three-point shots, the Red Raiders made 39% and went 9 for 23 on the night (incidentally, the same three-point numbers they put up against Gonzaga).

These aren’t remarkable three-point numbers in and of themselves. But they are interesting for two reasons: first, because there were so few possessions, field goals were held to a minimum, and both teams started to go long more than usual. And second, because Michigan State is nominally the more frequent three-point shooting team, the combination of Texas Tech stepping up their three-point production while Michigan State’s offense collapsed in the face of those scarce and stifling possessions of this game, we might just glimpse a slightly clearer picture of this strange and slow game through our bleary eyes.

So what can we learn from all this? Sometimes things just don’t go according to plan, especially when humans are involved (like, say, in a basketball game played by student athletes). But it’s also helpful to learn what we learned — which is everything we dissected during and after the game and discussed above. We couldn’t have done this without quality data, and by having it, we were able to put some of the pieces of this game together after watching it crash down over 40 agonizingly slow minutes. (And for what it’s worth, it wasn’t just Michigan State and Texas Tech that had an unusually low-scoring game: Saturday was the first Final Four semifinal day in which all four teams failed to surpass 65 points in the shot clock era. Just another fun fact brought to you by fast data analysis.)

Now that we know what Texas Tech can do with a slow-paced game, Virginia might just need to watch its back. So brace yourselves and caffeinate well: we’ll see you for Monday’s ice-cold glacier match. (We’re pretty darn sure.)