The Fourth Quarter

See, I threw you off, didn't I? You saw the post title and you saw the photo and you were like "hey Robert why did you attach a basketball photo to what is clearly going to be a football post talking about the fourth quarter of football games?" It's not. I want to talk about the fourth quarter of basketball games.

There isn't a fourth quarter, obviously. At least not in the men's game (although it's being debated). But if there was, I think we'd all be talking about the same thing right now. "Have you seen the scores in our fourth quarters?"

I thought of this while flipping through KenPom yesterday. I was clicking on some of the KenPom boxscores to look at some of the stats and I remembered that Ken lays out his boxscores by quarter. There aren't quarters, obviously, but he lists the breakdown by the first ten minutes, second ten minutes, third ten minutes, and fourth ten minutes.

An example. If you click on the score of the Illinois-EIU game on KenPom, the line score is shown like this:

In blowouts like that game, the Q4 score often shifts to the opponent because we sit everyone the final eight minutes and play the guys at the end of the bench. But in close games, I think you can learn something by looking at the 4th quarter. I mean, it's not even a "quarter." It's just "how do we play in the final ten minutes of close games?

Not great, Bob.