Ransom Stoddard
Ordained Dudeist Priest
- Bloomington, IL
ESPN has us as the first listed at the 4 way tie for second.
Which is also crazy since Michigan St. beat us twice. Head to head should be the first tie-break no?? We should be behind Mich St., but ahead of WisonsinESPN has us as the first listed at the 4 way tie for second.
It is head to head vs all the teams that are tied.Why are we behind Wisky after tonight? Isn’t head-to-head the first tiebreaker?
Right. There's no head to head with a multi team tie. It's aggregate wins and loss vs the teams tied. Being beaten twice by MSU really hurts if they are one of the teams we're tied with.It is head to head vs all the teams that are tied.
B. Multiple-team tie:
1. Results of head-to-head competition during the regular-season.
a. When comparing records against the tied teams, teams will be seeded based on winning percentage among the group, even if the number of games played against the team or group are unequal (i.e., 2-0 is better than 3-1, but 2-0 is not better than 1-0). If all teams among the group are separated based on winning percentage, all ties are broken. If winning percentage among the group for any tied teams is equal, move to step b with those specific tied teams only (e.g. if there is a four-team tie, one team is 4-0, another is 3-1 and the last two are 2-2 among the group, the two teams that are 2-2 move to step b and the teams that are 4-0 and 3-1 assume the next two available highest seeds).
Note: Teams can be separated from the top, middle or bottom.
b. If a team or teams are separated from the group based on step a, seeding for remaining teams among the group is not determined by head-to-head record vs. the remaining teams, but rather by taking all remaining teams to next tie breaker.
2. If the remaining teams are still tied, then each tied team's record shall be compared to the team occupying the highest position in the final regular-season standings, continuing down through the standings until one team gains an advantage.
a. When arriving at another pair of tied teams while comparing records, use each team's record against the collective tied teams as a group (prior to their own tie-breaking procedures), rather than the performance against the individual tied teams.
b. When comparing records against a single team or group of teams, the higher winning percentage shall prevail, even if the number of games played against the team or group are unequal (i.e., 2-0 is better than 3-1, but 2-0 is not better than 1-0).
3. Won-loss percentage of Division I opponents.
4. Coin toss conducted by Commissioner or designee.
I think the seeding now would go like this-
1) Maryland
2) Michigan State (3-2)
3) Wisconsin (2-2)
4) Illinois (2-2)
5) Penn State (1-2)
With the 4-team tie for 2nd place, first it's the records within the 4-team group.
Wisconsin has a win vs Maryland, so UW beats Illinois if Illinois & Wisconsin are tied in a multi-team tied group as we have now.
(Note, this could be wrong, didn't have time to double-check everything)
Here's the latest outlook. We're sitting in 5th place by mean seed, but not far behind PSU and MSU (less than half a seed line), with just over a 50% chance of a double-bye.
Also strange to observe that IU seems to have a weirdly good shot at a top-4 seed. The actual numbers there are very small - out of a million runs, they were the 4 seed 163 times (about 1 in 6,000) and the 3 seed only once. Comparing IU and, say Rutgers, I think we see this behavior because:
(obviously those scenarios are very unlikely to occur, but still fun to think about if you like stats)
- Both teams sit at 9 losses, so their best finish would be 11-9
- Both teams would need 2 or 3 of the 4 11-6 teams to finish 11-9 in order to get a 4 or 3 seed.
- For IU, those two things are correlated — they play both Illinois and Wisconsin, so an 11-9 IU means a higher likelihood of other 11-9 teams.
- For Rutgers, those two things are uncorrelated — they play Maryland and Purdue, so an 11-9 Rutgers means nothing about 11-6 teams falling to 11-9.
- The lesson — correlation is important!
View attachment 5769
We've been talking about tiebreakers a lot this week. The next two charts show 1) what the forecast would look like if all ties were broken by coin flip, and 2) the difference between the real situation and that scenario (where positive indicates better odds with the real tiebreakers).
As you can see, we do slightly better in the coin flip TB scenario, with about a 60% chance of a double-bye. The B1G tiebreakers are lowering our shot at the 1, 3, and 4 seed, but helping us out at the 2. This is, again, averaged over a million simulations, so that's not to say there aren't times when we're tied for 2nd and tiebreakers put us 3rd — just that, on average, tiebreakers are tending to bump us towards the 2 and 6 seeds and away from the 3 and 4 seeds.
View attachment 5770
View attachment 5771
Some other notes:
- Non-conference record was used in 269 of 1 million simulations, or around 1 in 4,000.
- I'm now counting championship tiesituations as well as total ties. We have about a 20% chance of a tie at the top, which breaks down into:
- 2 teams - 15%
- 3 teams - 4%
- 4 teams - 1.3%
- 5 teams - 0.5% (1 in 200)
- 6 teams - 0.03% (1 in 3,000)
- In terms of total ties, it looks like there's still a very remote chance for a 7-team tie, about 1 in 10,000. The simulation did not encounter any ties with 8+ teams, but that doesn't mean they're not still possible.
- Coin flip tiebreakers still seem to be in play, but only happened 4 times in a million simulations.
- A note on methods: With 20 games left, there are just over 1 million ways the remainder of the season could go. At this point it starts to be feasible to just check every scenario by going down the list. My code doesn't have a switch to go to that approach, though — it just simulates the remainder of the season N times, which should still produce something fairly close to the truth if N is large enough.
- Fun fact — assuming every game left has a 60% favorite and 40% underdog, 1 million simulations still only have a 1% chance of hitting the "all underdogs" scenario, which is over 3000 times less likely than "all favorites".
So....how much time do you have invested into this one particular post???
Probably depends what you are rooting for & maybe how you think we finishIs it worth rooting for MSU over Maryland to have a chance at a tie for 1st? (I doubt Maryland loses 3).
MSU and PSU play each other, so as I'm guessing was mentioned earlier in this thread - winning out guarantees a top 4 seed. And an MSU victory over gives us a reasonable shot a 1st. Maryland over MSU obviously helps avoid them in tie-breaker scenario.
It's a labor of love
Nice job. All of that could happen, however, the OS at MS is highly unlikely. I believe that Maryland is not as good as their record.Here's a handy rooting guide for that 1% chance at the #1 seed. Winners are in bold and I've included the chance according to Torvik.
Saturday 2/29
Michigan St. at Maryland (46%)
Sunday 3/1
Indiana at Illinois (72%)
Tuesday 3/3
Maryland at Rutgers (59%)
Michigan St. at Penn St. (63%)*
Thursday 3/5
Illinois at Ohio St. (25%)
Sunday 3/8
Michigan at Maryland (40%)
Ohio St. at Michigan St. (44%)*
Iowa at Illinois (64%)
*Michigan St. needs to lose only one game, the chance of which is 76%.
Also, other than Penn St. potentially beating Michigan St., it doesn't matter what Penn St. or Wisconsin do otherwise. If we win out, they can only match us in wins, and if that happens, we come out on top in tie-breakers. If all of the above happens and each of them lose a game, we get the #1 seed outright.