Big Ten Basketball Odds, New Year's Edition

Happy New Year Everyone! I have a little down time tonight and never much cared for New Year's so how about a quick update on the odds of each team to win the Men's Big Ten basketball title?

Once again, I use Kenpom efficiency data to project win probabilities for all remaining Big Ten games and then run a Monte Carlo simulation on the season to project the expected number of conference wins and the odds to finish at least tied for 1st place. Almost all of the non-conference games are in the books and all Big Ten teams have played 2 games. Here is the current win matrix:

Based on this current data, MSU and Ohio State are in an effective dead heat with an expected win total that is within a hundredth of a win of each other. The second tier of teams currently contains Maryland, Iowa, Purdue, Michigan, and Penn State, who are all projected to win between 11 and 12 games. Then, there is a cluster of five additional teams (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Rutgers, and Illinois) who are all projected to win around 9 games. Nebraska and Northwestern are both currently projected to win only around 4 games.

As for the odds to finish in 1st place, those odds are shown below:

As expected, this data mirrors the table above, where MSU's odds (48%) are slightly better than Ohio State's (46%) with no other team with odds over 11%. In general, the Big Ten champ(s) is likely (odds over 75%) to have "only" 15 or 16 wins in conference play.

For reference, the following charts show the trends in expected wins over the month of December. It will be fun to see how these numbers evolve in the next 2 months. MSU has held steady. OSU has literally been up and down, while Purdue's trend is basically just down.

Finally, here is the trend for the odds to win the Big Ten, with only the Top 5 teams showing:

That's all for now. As always, enjoy, and Go Green.

Comments

March Madness Analysis: Did the Selection Committee Get it Right in 2025?

I will be assembling my "usual" stats-based analysis of the bracket, complete with picks a little later this week (but before Thursday). For now, I had some thought on the bracket. In general, MSU's draw is about as good as fans could expect. I will go into more detail on that later. As for the job that the committee did... I am far from impressed. Once again, there are multiple errors in team selection, seeding, and bracketing as a whole. Let's look at each one in turn. Did the Committee get the right 68 teams? More or less. This is the area where I am the least concerned. As I mentioned yesterday, my metrics had UNC safely in the field and not even in the First Four, but I swapped them out for WVU at the last minute. UNC's single Q1 win gave me too much pause. I felt slightly vindicated when UNC made it. My biggest beef is with Texas making it in at 19-15. That's just too many loses. Yes, they had 7 Q1 wins, but that also had 5 loses outside of Q1 and an ov...

Dr. Green and White Helps You Fill Out Your Bracket (2025 Edition)

For my money, we are all of the cusp of the best three weeks of the entire year. We just wrapped up two weeks of conference tournaments, but those were just an appetizer to the main course that is yet to come. The powers that be gave us the menu on Sunday evening for the feast that is to come. Now it is time to enjoy a brief break and palette cleaner before we all make our selections. But what shall we choose? Which tasty little upset looks the best in the first round? Which teams are most likely to be sweet in the second weekend? Which quartet will comprise the final course? Over the years I have developed a set of analytics and computational tools to gain a better understanding of the mathematical underpinning of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. My methodology has a solid track record of correctly identifying upsets and sometimes doing more than that. In 2023, I used data to correctly predict that No. 4 seed UConn win the National Title. There is no foolproof way to dominate your...

2024 Week Eight Preview: OK Computer

Playing the first game after a bye week is like waking up from a nap. It is a little tough to predict how the body will respond. If a nap comes at just the right time and lasts for just the right length of time, it can be very refreshing and rejuvenating. But sometimes waking up for a nap can be rough. It can cause a disorienting, groggy feeling like suddenly two plus two equals five and that down is the new up. Based on the way the three weeks prior to the bye week went, last week's break at the midpoint of the season came at exactly the right time for the Spartans. Facing one top five team is challenging enough. Facing two top five teams on consecutive weekends including almost 5,000 miles of travel is something else entirely. But how will the rested Spartans look on the field come Saturday night? It is hard to predict what we are going to get. It is the classic "rest versus rust," million dollar question. I prefer to be optimistic and to believe that the Spartans will...

Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

Search This Blog