Lady Luck

I spent a little time reading Ken Pomeroy's fascinating site today to see if I could take anything positive from BU's latest infuriating overtime defeat, this time to bottom-feeding Stony Brook. Turns out Ken's got an interesting theory on why BU keeps losing these tight overtime games: they're just unlucky.

Pomeroy has calculated a statistic that estimates "luck" - or something close to it. Do NOT ask me how it's calculated, but it has something to do with the difference between the number of wins a team has, and the number that are expected to win by another of Pomeroy's extremely complicated formulas (which he gets from offensive efficiency, defensive efficiency, turnover percentages, etc.).

Bottom line: Pomeroy's formula says that BU is the 328th luckiest team in the nation, or the 9th unluckiest. And that makes sense, considering the string of overtime defeats. According to the numbers, BU's lack of luck means they have lost 2.3 games that they SHOULD have won.

And for comparison, here are the "luck" rankings of the rest of the America East:

20 Albany

55 Hartford

64 Vermont

76 New Hampshire

124 Binghamton

162 Stony Brook

244 UMBC

256 Maine

328 Boston U