The Dagger loves it some new-school coaching methods. Some coaches rage against the new, but it's important to remember that everything in the sport was at one point "new." The Princeton offense, the motion, the zone, the UCLA -- all different than the sets that came before them, all revolutionary in their own ways.

So it is with basketball statistics. One imagines that most coaches would stubbornly ignore tempo-free stats. You can just picture Digger Phelps saying that "everything he needs to know about the game he can see on the floor," or some such nonsense. On the subject of statistics, one imagines most old-school basketball coaches to be like most old school baseball people.

Not so with Wake Forest coach Dino Gaudio. He's seen the light on the Pomeroy Ratings slightly ahead of his peers, and it appears to be paying off:

"We really pay close attention to the Pomeroy Ratings here because they give you a truer indication of how good a team is offensively or defensively than just average points in a game because it is based on every 100 possessions," Gaudio said. "You can't say a team is good defensively just because it holds the ball on offense and keeps the score down. The Pomeroy Ratings are very revealing."

It seems at the end of last year, Gaudio examined his team's defensive efficiency rating, which held that the Demon Deacons were 88th in the country on the back end of the floor. So Gaudio and his staff decided to change the whole defensive philosophy. They settled on the packed-in style you see when you watch Wake play in 2008-09.

It won't happen overnight, but it's only a matter of time before most coaches do the exact same thing Gaudio does: keep an eye on statistics beyond points, rebounds, assists and shooting percentage. It will likely be a much smoother transition than baseball. After all, baseball's stats are far more finite and complex, and often counterintuitive to people who have long relied on their own first-hand observations for wisdom. Tempo-free stats merely record something most college hoops coaches are already obsessed with: making the most out of every single possession. That's not counterintuitive at all. That's just smart basketball.

Related: ACC Basketball, College Basketball Media