B1G Tournament Forecasting Thread

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#201      

201154JC

Rockford, IL
As of right now bigten.org has us in third. I'm sure that is correct as they should know the tiebreak rules.
 
#202      

Dan

Admin
As of right now bigten.org has us in third. I'm sure that is correct as they should know the tiebreak rules.
BigTen.org's first tiebreaker is overall winning percenrage, second tiebreaker is school alphabetical order.

I don't know why bigten.org standings are not true BTT tiebreakers, but unfortunately it's not helpful.
 
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#203      

201154JC

Rockford, IL
BigTen.org's first tiebreaker is overall winning percenrage, second tiebreaker is school alphabetical order.

I don't know why bigten.org standings are not true BTT tiebreakers, but unfortunately it's not helpful.
That's odd isn't it. You would think they would have an algorithm that automatically placed the teams properly.
 
#204      
If the Illini Win 2 of 3 and one win is Iowa they are almost a lock for a top 4 seed with the remaining schedules. If they win all three they will have a high probability of the 2 seed.
 
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#205      
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#206      

201154JC

Rockford, IL
What really stands out for me is the fact that the Illini have the best road record overall of any BIG school. Imagine if we win at OS, 6-4 on the road in conference play. That's elite in this year's conference.
 
#207      
What really stands out for me is the fact that the Illini have the best road record overall of any BIG school. Imagine if we win at OS, 6-4 on the road in conference play. That's elite in this year's conference.
Want to show Liddell why he made a bad decision. He would be a help to this team. Kick their butts.
 
#208      

Epsilon

M tipping over
Pdx
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:
  • 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!
(obviously those scenarios are very unlikely to occur, but still fun to think about if you like stats)

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".
Not sure I'll read every word of this post but I "liked" this post to acknowledge the hard work that went into it. :)
 
#209      
@danielb927 im not sure if you said this. Is it possible for you put what actually happens into your system and back check to see if what actually happened also happened in your simulations and how many times?
 
#210      

danielb927

Orange Krush Class of 2013
Rochester, MN
@danielb927 im not sure if you said this. Is it possible for you put what actually happens into your system and back check to see if what actually happened also happened in your simulations and how many times?

Not exactly. For now I'm only saving a few end results: the seeding breakdown, some info on ties, and matchup information. But there's nothing preventing the program from saving the exact outcome of every simulation — I just haven't done it yet. Sounds like a neat idea and should be pretty easy to add.

That said, it's pretty easy to estimate this for any given scenario. As long as you know what odds the simulation used (which I do save for each run), you can back out the likelihood, at least, of having hit a given situation.

Let's say you wanted to know how many times last night's simulations had all 20 home teams winning. The likelihood of that scenario (all home teams winning) was about 0.007% (you get this by multiplying the home team's odds for all 20 games). That means I'd expect that scenario to have occurred about 70 times, since 0.007% of a million is 70. It's almost a certainty that it was simulated at least once.

By contrast, say you wanted to know about a scenario with all road teams winning. That's is almost a million times less likely, only a 0.000000009% shot (that's about 1 in 10 billion). Even in a million simulations, you wouldn't really expect that to happen — the odds of even simulating it are still only 0.009%.

So, coincidentally, the odds of home teams winning all 20 games left if the season were played once, and the odds of road teams winning all 20 games left if the season were played a million times, are about the same. Weird!
 
#211      
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%)

Also, other than Penn St. potentially beating Michigan St., it doesn't matter what Penn St. or Wisconsin do otherwise.

Is the bolded why Penn vs Iowa Saturday not listed?
 
#212      
The only thing that will help us come seeding time will be in a tie with Penn State and Wisconsin. Maybe Iowa if we beat them next Sunday. Being in any multi-team tiebreaker with Michigan State (and if we lose to Iowa next Sunday) and we're screwed.
 
#213      

haasi

New York
MSU over Maryland ✅

Tomorrow: Illinois over IU

let’s do this!!!


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.
 
#214      

danielb927

Orange Krush Class of 2013
Rochester, MN
I hope to post an updated chart in the AM prior to tomorrow's 4 B1G games! In the meantime, just added a counter for the number of times each team gets at least a share of the championship. Here's what it would have said this morning, prior to the MSU and Iowa wins today:

B1G championships (including ties) out of 100k simulations
Illinois: 4954 (5%)
Iowa: 575 (0.6%)
Maryland: 95810 (96%)
Michigan St.: 8966 (9%)
Penn St.: 7796 (8%)
Wisconsin: 11160 (11%)
 
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