Big 12 Basketball Simulated Conference Race

January 6, 2006

On the brink of beginning the Big 12 season, I thought it'd be interesting to look at how the race shapes up. There have been a lot of surprises (good and bad) for Big 12 teams so far. Oklahoma and Texas, heavy pre-season favorites, have had major slipups. Yet, Kansas St. and Colorado have posted strong records, albeit against weaker competition.

These projections are entirely based on power ratings, which capture results so far this season. They don't look at rivalries, conference historical performances, etc. They are not always accurate, but now that the season is nearing the halfway point, they do represent a pretty good estimate of which teams are strongest. You can argue that KSU and CU are not two of the best teams in the conference, but I will argue that their results THUS FAR do not make that clear (case in point, Colorado's 60+ margin over Savannah State).

In years past, I've done these projections using only Sagarin ratings as a method of estimating the chance that a team will win a game. This season, I've decided to use Sagarin's PREDICTOR rating (supposed to be a more accurate predictor than the regular rating) and Pomeroy's rating. Since each system is designed to predict a margin, I simply averaged the two ratings along with the home-court advantage to produce an expected margin of victory. I then converted this margin of victory into an expected chance of winning a game.

I run thousands of simulated seasons (schedule corresponds to this season's schedule, so Texas and KU only play once in Austin in every simulated season, for example). The results are as follows:

	# Seasons	10000
Pwr Rtg	Team	Avg Wins	Champ%	Outright %	Current W	Current L
80.395	Colorado	11.80	54.4%	36.5%	0	0
78.485	Tex	11.28	41.2%	24.6%	0	0
73.125	KSU	9.18	9.6%	3.9%	0	0
71.89	Okla St	8.93	7.6%	2.9%	0	0
71.395	Kansas	8.58	5.9%	2.2%	0	0
70.845	Okla	8.57	5.4%	2.1%	0	0
69.96	Tex A&M	8.23	3.9%	1.3%	0	0
70.04	Iowa St	8.11	3.8%	1.4%	0	0
64.08	Missouri	5.96	0.3%	0.0%	0	0
62.8	Nebraska	5.48	0.2%	0.1%	0	0
62.77	Tex Tech	5.64	0.2%	0.0%	0	0
58.78	Baylor	4.23	0.0%	0.0%	0	0

Currently, it is projected that KU will finish 5th in the conference, most likely with an 8-8 record, and only about a 6% chance of winning a share of the championship. Given their performance so far, this does not surprise me. But don't forget, KU has one of the biggest upsides in the Big 12, along with OSU, I'd say. Freshmen take a good half-season or so to start learning the ropes.

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