How Ken Pomeroy Became College Basketball's Favorite Number-Cruncher

He can no longer remember who was first, can't pinpoint which college basketball coach took notice of his website and reached out to him or mentioned him in public before anyone else did. But here is one sign that a former meteorologist named Ken Pomeroy has become one of the most important statistical influences in the sport: There are now coaches who claim to have been following his work since the beginning, like aging hipsters posturing over their discovery of nascent Pavement songs.

"John Groce (now at Illinois) likes to claim he was one of the first adopters, I think going back to when he was an assistant at Ohio State," Pomeroy told VICE Sports by phone from his home in Salt Lake City last weekend. "Scott Drew (now at Baylor) might have been the first coach to contact me about it."

It's still bizarre to him how this all happened, how over the course of roughly 12 years, Pomeroy's numbers have become an indispensable resource for both hardcore college basketball fans and for college basketball teams themselves, many of whom pay $19.99 for a 12-month subscription to access the site's advanced analytics. Back at the turn of the 21st century, Pomeroy was perfectly happy in his job as a meteorologist—"It wasn't a job I hated," he said—but he began tinkering with sports analytics on the side, wondering if he could somehow tweak or build on the systems that were already out there from numbers gurus like Jeff Sagarin.

Pomeroy, 42, had grown up in northern Virginia as a college basketball fan, and sometime during the 2003-04 season he was watching an Air Force team that was being lauded by television broadcasters for its defense. This was the muse he was seeking, because it led Pomeroy to do something no one had done before: Quantifying basketball teams by controlling for tempo.

Pomeroy wondered whether Air Force was getting more credit for its defense than it deserved, largely because of its slow-paced offense. It turned out they were, and Pomeroy built his entire system off that idea. At first, Pomeroy hoped his formula would become a predictive mechanism, a way of knowing what the point spread in a game might be two or three weeks before Las Vegas put it on the board. It was less an attempt to get a betting edge than an extension of the predictive interests that led him to meteorology in the first place.

These days, of course, KenPom.com is less focused on prognostications—"I definitely would not claim to have the best predictive model out there," he said—and more about breaking down teams based on their offensive and defensive effectiveness, all of which are adjusted for a team's pace of play. (Citadel, for instance, is No. 1 in Pomeroy's adjusted tempo ranks this year, but at 10-22 under first-year coach Dugger Baucom, the Bulldogs are 308th in Pomeroy's overall rankings as of Monday. Virginia, with the slowest adjusted tempo in the country, was first overall heading into Championship Week.)

Slowly, Pomeroy's system trickled down to the media, where reporters and commentators from Sports Illustrated and ESPN began utilizing his numbers on a regular basis. And then in 2010, Pomeroy broke big: Butler's Brad Stevens acknowledged that, in the days before the Bulldogs nearly pulled off a monumental upset of Duke in the national championship game, he had utilized Pomeroy's numbers to craft a game plan. A year later, The New York Times profiled him; in 2013, Pomeroy quit his job in meteorology to work full-time on the site.

Pomeroy has no idea how many teams actually use his data for scouting—he also declines to reveal his overall subscriber numbers—but he estimates maybe 250 schools check the numbers or subscribe to the site. Maybe 100 to 150 of those use it regularly, he guesses, and about 50 "really know what they're doing with it." Sometimes, teams will hire Pomeroy to do extra analytical work for them: He has consulted for the Houston Rockets and Baylor's basketball program in the past, and this year, he says, he's consulting for Iowa State and VCU, providing them additional information that goes beyond what's on his site. He also has spoken with NCAA tournament selection committee members in the past, and the committee lists his websites as one of its selection criteria, though Pomeroy says he can't be sure how or how much they utilize his numbers.

Either way, it's a remarkable rise for a guy who never really imagined he'd be doing this, and who still considers himself a fan above all else.

Pomeroy misses forecasting the weather sometimes, if only because the weather is pervasive, and because it affects everyone. There are times when he gets an angry e-mail about the statistical perception of some mid-major team and wonders, Is what I'm doing really that consequential or profound? But he gets to work his own hours, work out of his home, and work in his favorite sport. This week, he'll head to Las Vegas, where three different conference tournaments are being contested, where the most wide-open season in recent memory is approaching its apex: The top teams in Pomeroy's rankings are more bunched together this year than they ever have been before, and the teams in the top 20 or so are more closely grouped than in the past. Whether that parity can be correlated directly to the NCAA's rules changes—including a shortened shot clock—is a project Pomeroy may undertake in the offseason.

The conference tournaments, Pomeroy wrote on his blog last week, are his favorite time of the year, even more so than the NCAA tournament, when he often winds up fielding criticism from gamblers and fans who accuse him of screwing up their brackets. He'll spend the time in Vegas talking to reporters and maybe a few of the coaches who have utilized his numbers all season long. But mostly, he'll just hang out and watch basketball.

"People say, 'I don't think he even watches the games,'" Pomeroy said. "But I definitely like to watch the games. I just like the numbers, too."