Originally posted on 03/05/2018:

Very cool trick with Opponent FT %, but a few observations and questions come to mind to try and challenge:
1) I thought about this more once I saw that BYU is #3 in this stat last year; however looking 3 years beyond that, they rank ~ in the 200's in each year.
2) But seeing them in the top 5 YOY, I was wondering can there be legitimate fundamentals as to why BYU (or any team in general) benefits so much in this category? i.e. does the team implement a hack a Shaq approach late in games? Does the team not have a physical enough big man to match up against some of their conference foes they play twice a year, and foul those big guys a lot (who also are not good FT shooters)? Does a team generally not foul much, except later in the game when they get tired on D, but also their opponent has fatigue shooting FTs?
3) Should we be looking at BYU's opp FT stats for conference games only for a couple of reasons? a) they can play some cupcakes early in season vs. poor FT teams in general (which they did Alabama, TX-Arlington, Miss Valley State, albeit this is not the case for these teams when they played BYU this year all shot above their current season averages) that other teams in conference do not b) some of those early season games can be on neutral sites with bad backdrops. Or, at home, against those small cupcake schools that play in High School gyms now traveling to BYU (this might not be the case as I'm not sure how big BYU gym is, but in general).
4) If there is some fundamentals as to why a team might rank on the high side, likely due to conference fundamentals, would it be better to use the overall average for NON conference matchups?

I'm sure most of this is just looking for signal in the noise, but thought I would put it out there in the off chance of some potential deeper findings

Which this leads me to another question - when you track your own numbers, which source(s) do you use to start from? And do you have some ETL that runs each day, loading and cleaning the data into your database? Or do you pay for some data service provider? Or does Pauly come over and manually crunch the numbers after he cleans the pool? Or if you tell us, you'd have to kill us

Thanks!