With Selection Sunday in the rearview, the stage has officially been set for the 2025 NCAA tournament. We know the field of 68 men's and women's college basketball teams competing for a national championship. The only thing left to do before the games begin is predict how they will shake out.
Filling out a March Madness bracket is incredibly fun, though it's also difficult, specifically for the average fan. Not everyone across the country is familiar with the state of the University of Nebraska Omaha or Norfolk State's hoops programs, and that's okay.
Fortunately, several resources are available to make picking winners in the Big Dance as easy as possible at our fingertips, namely KenPom rankings. We often hear/see the data from this statistical archive website. But what exactly is it and where did it come from?
Who is Ken Pomeroy?
KenPom.com was created and founded by Ken Pomeroy in 2004, a former meteorologist for the National Weather Service. Talk about a career shift!
Pomeroy earned an undergraduate degree in civil engineering from Virginia Tech and a graduate diploma in meteorology from the University of Wyoming. His education led him to a government job, where he used analytical expertise to forecast tornadoes; not March Madness.
Eventually, Pomeroy's mathematical interests aligned with his sports fandom of college basketball, and KenPom was born. However, his work wasn't always universally accepted as it is today.
In 2007, Pomeroy worked for ESPN TV, which "ended up not going that well," according to him. The stats he pulled for "about 50 games" were rarely mentioned on the air at first. Now, they're a staple of college basketball coverage across all networks.
What are KenPom rankings?
"The first thing you should know about this system is that it is designed to be purely predictive," Pomeroy states. In other words, KenPom indicates future performance — it's not a reflection of a team's past efforts.
KenPom tells you "how strong a team would be if it played tonight, independent of injuries or emotional factors." As mentioned, nobody can follow every school's contests. This is meant to "give you a snapshot" of how things stand nationwide.
It's not a perfect model, but Pomeroy has optimized the technology, tailoring it to basketball rather than something that applies to all sports. The system is predicated on properly weighing each game, based on factors like strength of schedule, margin of victory and defensive/offensive ratings.
Of course, a blowout win is more valuable than a prevailing by the skin of your teeth. Conversely, losing against stronger competition is worth more than beating up on inferior opponents.
Per Pomeroy, "the core" of KenPom is the Pythagorean calculation for expected winning percentage." A team’s adjusted offensive and defensive efficiencies are input into the equation, which are scoring-per-possession metrics — with no correlation to winning or losing.
For those unsure, "'adjusted' ... refers to how a team would perform against average competition at a neutral site."
How can KenPom help you to build a better March Madness Bracket?
Is a 30-plus-win team in a lower-tier league like the WCC up to par with even a middling power conference squad? It can be challenging to gauge how much competition (or lack thereof) impacts winning and losing. But KenPom separates the facts from the extracurricular fluff, focusing solely on the numbers.
KenPom gives you an up-to-date idea of how truly unstoppable or vulnerable a team is. With this, you can make informed decisions that will help win your March Madness bracket pool!
For example, Gonzaga is the No. 9 seed in the Midwest Region of this year's men's tourney. Yet, they have a greater KenPom rating than St. John's, who finished fifth in the final regular-season AP Poll. Nevertheless, the Red Storm earned the No. 2 line in the West, though they're ostensibly not as intimidating as the Bulldogs.
In a vacuum, KenPom believes Gonzaga is superior to St. John's, regardless of what the selection committee thinks.