KenPom tries curling. Now we have KenPom global curling ratings.

Yep.

Some people have taken up knitting to deal with our increasingly homebound lives during the coronavirus pandemic. For others, it’s baking bread. And, considering the uptick in guitar sales, more people probably have learned to play “Stairway to Heaven” now than at any point since the 1970s.


But what do you do if you’re a college basketball analytics trailblazer who suddenly is left without any college basketball to analyze? If you’re Ken Pomeroy, you turn to curling.

Yes, curling, the ice-based sport that attracts a whiff of amused attention every four years at the Olympics but then retreats to its status as a niche sport played in some of the world’s colder climates. Pomeroy is attempting to statistically analyze curling the way he does college basketball, posting the results at DoubleTakeout.com, where he also blogs about the sport.

In a telephone interview, Pomeroy said his interest was piqued after he took up the sport in Utah, where he lives.

“I was playing for a few years and I guess I kind of figured out it was a good middle-aged-person’s sport, a nice outlet for those competitive juices,” he said. “Obviously my basketball days are behind me. I picked up hockey a few years ago, and that went about as well on my body as basketball did. The place where I played hockey they had a curling league, so I discovered curling through there.”

Pomeroy, a meteorologist by trade, began his college basketball ratings as a way to more properly interpret the sport and predict results. His statistics measure how teams perform on each possession — offense and defense — rather than over an entire game, where numbers can be skewed by teams that operate at faster or slower paces. Fans, sportswriters and coaches rely on Pomeroy’s numbers, and point spreads issued by oddsmakers often closely align with the score predictions at KenPom.com, which offers some free information but charges a subscription fee for more in-depth analysis.

Pomeroy began his curling blog last summer, after the end of the college basketball season was erased by the pandemic. He is taking a pretty basic approach in his attempt to predict outcomes and rank the world’s best teams, both men’s and women’s.

“The curling ratings are a little different [than the basketball ratings] in that they don’t look at scoring margin or anything like that,” he said. “So it just looks at who a team’s beaten and who a team’s lost to and kind of evaluates their record based on who they played. … It sounds a little like the RPI [a now-discredited metric once employed by the NCAA to evaluate teams], but it’s not computed in that way at all. It’s a very fair way to handle results and strength of schedule.”​

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/02/26/kenpom-curling-rankings/

DoubleTakeout.com | World curling ratings

DoubleTakeout.com | Let’s talk curling