"Adjusted Scoring Margin." Get used to the term. You're going to hear it early and often in this space.

Regular readers will remember the public debut of this metric last season. I had been playing with it for a year or so previously, for no apparent reason other than needing something to do during non-Bracketology periods.

Then came the 2000 NCAA Tournament. On a whim, we calculated Adjusted Scoring Margin for the then 64-team field (at this point feel free to say, "what is he talking about?").

All of you know what "scoring margin" is. It's the average number of points by which a given team wins (or loses) its games. Duke may win, for instance, by an average of 20 points per game. So might a team like TCU. But does that mean the Horned Frogs are as good as the Blue Devils?

Of course not, leading me to look for some way to "adjust" scoring margin statistics on a team-by-team basis. In order to do that, the overall quality of a team's opponents must be taken into account. It has to mean more to beat North Carolina by 20 points -- well, maybe not this year, but you get the idea -- than it does to trounce Texas Southern by the same margin.

The rationale here is no different than what goes into RPI. Obviously it is a much more positive barometer of a team's relative strength to go 7-3 against a very good schedule than, say, 9-1 versus mediocre opposition. This is exactly why SOS ("Strength of Schedule") has become such a distress signal for certain teams come Selection Sunday.

So, just as SOS gives context to a given team's winning percentage, Adjusted Scoring Margin does the same with margin of victory. Perhaps Duke is winning by 20 points per game against teams that, by statistical comparison, it should "only" be defeating by 10. And TCU's schedule might be so weak that it should be winning by 25 points per game instead of 20. In this example, then, Duke's adjusted scoring margin would be plus-10 ppg while TCU checks in at minus­5 ppg.

As demonstrated last year, there are also ways to adjust scoring margins both offensively and defensively (we called it Offensive Quotient and Defensive Quotient, respectively). Offensive Quotient is the average points per game a team scores more/less than it should, relative to the competition, and Defensive Quotient is what that team allows per game (again based on the quality of its competition). A team's Adjusted Scoring Margin is the sum of those two figures.

So, what about the 2000 NCAA Tournament? Playing around with some rough data that year, yours truly forecast Michigan State over Florida for the national championship. This doesn't seem so clairvoyant now, but, at the time, the Gators were an unpredictable No. 5 seed in the same bracket with Duke and Temple (both teams ranked in the top five of the national polls).

I'd be lying if I said for certain that Michigan State and Florida had the absolute best adjusted scoring margins heading into that year's tourney (the scrap of paper on which everything was calculated is in an airline seat pocket somewhere). What I do remember is that both teams had among the highest adjusted scoring margins in the field both offensively and defensively, and that this "balance" -- along with their respective total(s) -- led to the successful prediction.

Using similar numbers for the 2001 tourney (crunched expertly by Chris Lunardi, Steve Jenkins and Jeffrey Lunardi), the call here was Stanford over Michigan State for the national championship. Again, it was the balance between adjusted offensive and defensive margins -- even more than overall team total(s) -- which led to that forecast.

We now know Duke defeated Arizona for the NCAA championship last year. Looking back at the data, perhaps we should re-think the notion of offensive/defensive balance and focus more on overall Adjusted Scoring Margin. After all, it doesn't matter whether a team dominates offensively or defensively (or both), so long as it dominates.

Here, then, are the top Adjusted Scoring Margin (ASM) figures for last year's NCAA field:

1. Duke (+25.8 ppg)
2. Stanford (+21.2 ppg)
3. Arizona (+19.9 ppg)
4. Michigan State (+19.6 ppg)
5. Florida (+17.8 ppg)
6. Maryland (+17.5 ppg)
7. Kansas (+16.4 ppg)
8. Wake Forest (+16.0 ppg)
9. Illinois (+15.3 ppg)
10. Arkansas (+14.9 ppg)

What do we learn? ASM correctly forecast three of the Final Four entrants (missing only Maryland, which defeated Stanford in the West Regional final), and it tabbed Duke over Arizona for the title among those teams that did advance to Minneapolis. Not too bad.

From this chart, only Arkansas (to Georgetown, +10.9 ppg) and Wake Forest (to Butler, +11.3 ppg) suffered first-round defeats. Florida lost a second-round game to Temple (+9.5 ppg). Six of the remaining seven teams on the list played in at least a regional championship game. The seventh, Kansas, fell to Illinois in the Sweet 16.

And, as for the so-called "upsets"? You be the judge (using 2001 NCAA seeding):