A Boxing-like Round-by-Round Analysis of American College Basketball

In the last two decades, basketball coaches have increasingly relied on statistical analysis to determine coaching strategies for their teams. Davidson College (USA) men’s basketball coach Bob McKillop divides each game into ten “rounds”, with a round ending at each media timeout and at halftime, and gives his team several “round” goals for every game. In this article we investigate how winning rounds affects the outcome of a basketball game and investigate whether certain rounds are more important than others. We also look at whether the results of multiple rounds give more information than just looking at the results of one round at a time and whether there are other easy-to-measure factors that can produce a predictive model. Finally, we investigate whether there are any differences related to Davidson’s round record compared to other teams as Davidson’s players are coached to think about this strategy.