Ken Pomeroy headlines UNC's Basketball Analytics Summit

Ken Pomeroy misses his days as a meteorologist.

The college basketball statistician — who spoke Saturday at the third annual SPEIA Basketball Analytics Summit hosted at the Kenan-Flagler Business School — has garnered much respect for his website KenPom, considered among the top sources for advanced analytics.

But Pomeroy attributes his current success to his 12-year career of predicting the weather for the government.

“(I wish) I could make that a requirement for you guys (to) be a meteorologist for six months ...” Pomeroy joked to the audience in the Maurice J. Koury Auditorium.

“Forecasting the weather is a whole nother challenge.”

Pomeroy said the crux of meteorology is making daily predictions and staying accountable for them.

But unlike basketball analysts — who are celebrated for confidence — weather forecasters pride themselves on accuracy over certainty.

“You don’t get paid much to come on the air and say, ‘Hey, there’s a 60 percent chance Villanova wins this game,’” he said. “But that’s really what my work has been founded on.”

To demonstrate his work, Pomeroy offered the crowd month-long subscriptions to his website — showcasing both its user-friendly display and the depth of its metrics.

“I feel like it’s kind of a gateway to more hardcore analytics,” he said. “Make it simple, get you hooked.”

Among the intrigued was North Carolina guard Nate Britt, who sat with his sister Natalya in the front row of Pomeroy’s presentation.

The junior, who attended the summit in 2015, said his team is familiar with KenPom and utilizes statistics often. But the Tar Heels currently don’t employ an analytics expert.

Following his basketball career, Britt could see himself in that role.

“I’m just in here trying to sit in and get as much information as possible,” he said. “I just like the direction that analytics is taking right now.”

Pomeroy said when he began focusing on sports analytics, only two people — Dean Oliver and John Hollinger — were actively working in the field.

Nearly two decades later, advanced stats have transformed the sports industry.

“We’re no longer a TV company at ESPN ...” said Noel Nash, vice president of ESPN Stats and Information, at Friday’s keynote address. “Really, we’re a data company. We’re a content company.”

Patrick Lucey — director of data science at STATS — revealed Saturday how tracking technologies like SportsVU can create interactive interfaces, even opening the possibility of virtual reality in the near future.

“I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface on really understanding that data and using that data,” Nash said.

Britt — whose decision to switch shooting hands in 2014 was driven in part by analytics — said he hoped to learn how important analytics are to college basketball.

But Pomeroy, in his final words at the summit, presented the ultimate conundrum of his industry.

“It is one of life’s great ironies that you can’t quantify the value of analytics.”

@CJacksonCowart

sports@dailytarheel.com