KenPom Creator Traces Basketball Analytics Roots to UW Laramie Pickup Games

Before KenPom.com became the gold standard of college basketball analytics, it was an idea bouncing around a graduate student's head between pickup runs at Half Acre Gym and late shifts in the first-floor computer lab of the University of Wyoming's engineering building.

Ken Pomeroy arrived in Laramie in 1998 to pursue a master's degree in atmospheric science, drawn to UW partly by the state's notoriously wild weather. He had already earned a civil engineering degree from Virginia Tech in 1995 and spent a few years designing roads in Maryland before deciding to change course entirely. He applied to UW's atmospheric science program in 1997 and came to Laramie the following year with no particular plan beyond studying storms.

What he found, in between writing his thesis, was an itch he couldn't ignore. Rating college basketball teams with statistical precision, the way Jeff Sagarin was doing it, fascinated him. "Laramie is really where it started," Pomeroy said. "How could I make a ratings like Sagarin has? I started researching that in some downtime I had from writing my thesis, and then I really started focusing on college basketball five or six years later. 2004 was really the first season when I started doing the points per possession and things like that, so I started there and dug into it pretty deep."

Pomeroy graduated from UW in 1999 and went on to work as a meteorologist for the National Weather Service until 2012. But Laramie had already planted the seed. The method he built out of that engineering computer lab, applying the probabilistic thinking of weather forecasting to the chaos of 365 Division I basketball programs, proved to have a longer shelf life than any storm system.

"My rankings are designed to establish how good every men's college basketball team is in the country right now," Pomeroy said. "My original purpose was to make forecasts about it, because it's not an easy sport to predict. Not all the teams are evenly matched. It's like making weather forecasts, which is challenging."

KenPom.com's rise tracked slowly at first, then all at once. Around 2008, writers and analysts from ESPN began referencing his numbers. The New York Times and Sports Illustrated followed. Coaches began consulting his efficiency metrics, offensive and defensive ratings, tempo and pace data, to scout opponents. Sports bettors and broadcast media built workflows around his ratings. What started as thesis-break tinkering became a full-time subscription business, and Pomeroy eventually left a teaching post at the University of Utah to run it from his home in Salt Lake City.

The connection to Laramie runs deeper than nostalgia. KenPom ratings are currently used to evaluate Cowboys head coach Sundance Wicks, with the system measuring his ability to get players performing above their statistical expectations. The site that tracks all 365 Division I programs tracks Wyoming among them, still shaped by the frameworks Pomeroy first sketched out in a campus computer lab more than a quarter century ago.