One of the things I admire about my colleague Luke Winn is the detailed work he does on college basketball stats. If you've read his stuff, you know what I'm talking about. He spends hours of time breaking down game film to come with interesting, sabermetric-like numbers for college basketball. It's elaborate and interesting stuff.

Earlier tonight I was struck when Luke tweeted this out:

https://twitter.com/#!/lukewinn/status/167049844513443840

And the reason I was struck is because almost exactly one year ago, ESPN swiped an entire graphic's worth of data from Luke, about post feeds to Jared Sullinger, and aired it during an Ohio State game without attribution to SI. ESPN later apologized.

So I emailed Luke to ask about this latest incident.

He said at halftime of the Kentucky-Florida game, an ESPN analyst reported that Aaron Craft creates about eight turnovers per 100 possessions. There was no attribution -- yet the stat does exist quite prominently in Luke's last Power Rankings:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/writers/luke_winn/02/02/power.rankings/index.html

I asked Luke how he calculated that stat. He said that he's studied every single Ohio State University turnover from this season on tape, and tabulated them in an Excel database to create the per-possession percentage. That's a stat that, as we all know, you don't get in the box score.

Now it is possible that ESPN research got this on their own, and if so, I apologize for bringing this up.

But if this was taken from the laborious work of Winn, he deserves the credit for his work by name. And viewers deserve the original source of the material. (I'll note here Dick Vitale is very good about citing the work of writers when he calls games.)

If an ESPN college basketball writer spent hours producing interesting stats, I know its editorial staff would want that staffer to be cited in other publications.

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