Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

For as long as I can remember, I have loved the NCAA Basketball Tournament. I love the bracket. I love the underdogs. I love One Shining Moment. I even love the CBS theme music. As a kid I filled out hand-drawn brackets and scoured the morning newspaper for results of late night games. As I got older, I started tracking scores using a increasing complex set of spreadsheets. Over time, as my analysis became more sophisticated, I began to notice certain patterns to the Madness I have found that I can use modern analytics and computational tools to gain a better understanding of the tournament itself and perhaps even extract some hints as to how the tournament might play out. Last year, I used this analysis to correctly predict that No. 4 seed UConn win the National Title in addition to other notable upsets. There is no foolproof way to dominate your office pool, but it is possible to spot upsets that are more likely than others and teams that are likely to go on a run or flame out early.

Michigan State basketball fans had very high expectations coming into the 2023-24 season. After a surprising run to the Sweet 16 last March with most of the roster coming back, and with members of a top recruiting coming to East Lansing over the summer, the Spartans' lofty preseason ranking seemed completely justified. But starting in the opening game dress rehearsal against James Madison, it was clear that something was a bit "off" about this year's Spartan squad. As the loses accumulated in the non-conference, the overall production looked less like a show that was ready for Broadway and more like a small-town community theatre farce The second act of the season looked more promising. Following the win at Michigan, the Spartans looked poised to finish strong and challenge for maybe even top five seed in the NCAA Tournament. But as the final curtain of regular season drew near, the Spartans tripped and flubbed their lines yet again, losing four of the last five games

In less than 48 hours, the 2023-24 Big Ten regular season will come to a close. In the mean time, there are still seven games left to play, which corresponds to 128 possible endings and 94 unique Big Ten Tournament brackets. For the Michigan State Spartans, the seeding scenarios are very straight forward. If the Spartans can win on the road against the Indiana Hoosiers on Sunday afternoon, Michigan State will earn the No. 6 or No. 7 seed depending on the result of the Iowa/Illinois game that will be played later on Sunday evening. An Illinois victory would result in the No. 6 seed for the Spartans, while an Iowa victory would give the Green and White the No. 7 seed. If the Spartans cannot get the win in Bloomington, Michigan State drops to the No. 8 seed in the Big Ten Tournament. In general, the better the seed, the better the chances that the Spartans will have to win more games in the tournament and thus improve their seed in the NCAA Tournament. Based on the range of Michigan State

At the beginning of the Big Ten regular season, there were a total of 140 games on the schedule. Simple math tells us that there were 1x10^42 (or one "tredecillion") different ways in which the full season could play out. That is approximately the number of water molecules in all of the oceans on earth. That astronomically large number of scenarios could have resulted in any one of 87 billion different brackets for the Big Ten Tournament. As of March 5, 129 of those 140 games is in the books, leaving just 11 Big Ten games in the regular season. This still leaves 2,048 different scenarios and 966 possible unique Big Ten Tournament brackets that could occur. In today's update, let's explore the remaining possible Big Ten Tournament scenarios that are still on the table for the Michigan State Spartans (9-9) following Saturday night's loss to Purdue. As always, the full set of data related to the Big Ten race and Big Ten Tournament can be found in the odds and data tr