There are currently 358 teams NCAA Division I for men’s college basketball. Anyone who follows the sport (at least in an online capacity) has likely heard of Ken Pomeroy and his wonderful website, Kenpom.com, which measures the sport in detailed ways unlike any other. One stat available on the site is the “Luck” rating of each team, which, “effectively compares a team’s actual output to their expected output, where positive numbers indicate greater luck,” as Brett Barnett detailed in a piece for Rocky Top Talk a year ago.
In the past four seasons, Northwestern has finished 326th, 348th, 334th, 333st in KenPom’s “Luck” statistic, and this year, the Wildcats sit in a familiar place at 342nd following yet another late game collapse, this time at the hands of Penn State inside Welsh-Ryan Arena.