Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

As we approach the end of January, a lot of college basketball discussion has turned to the NCAA Tournament. The question on everyone's mind right now is whether the Tournament is going to happen at all this year. As for now, the plan remains i place to the play the entire NCAA Tournament in the state of Indiana using (more or less) the normal schedule.  However, as COVID-based pauses and cancelled or postponed games continue to mount, it is harder and harder to believe that this plan is going to actually work. That said, I do believe that the Tournament will happen this year, in some form. Will it contain 68 teams and will it actually take place in March? Those points, I believe, are still unclear. As for MSU fans, the big question is whether or not the Spartans are going to be a part of the Big Dance at all this year. Right now, in the midst of a now three-week pause, Michigan State seems to be squarely on the bubble.  ESPN's Joe Lunardi has MSU as one of the last teams in ...

It has now been 19 days since the Michigan State Spartans took the court. While MSU's position in the standings has not changed, there has certainly been a lot of action elsewhere in the Big Ten. With everything seemingly on track for the Spartans to return to action on Thursday night at Rutgers, it is once again time to check the overall status of the Big Ten race. Current Standings and Odds Update As usual, here are the updated enhanced Big Ten standings as of 01/27/2021. Table 1: Updated enhanced Big Ten standings as of 01/27/2021 The big change since the last update was that Iowa had a miserable second half against Indiana last week, resulting in the second loss of the season for the Hawkeyes. Meanwhile, the Michigan Wolverines picked up another win or two and now have a game-and-a-half lead in the standings. It is also notable that Michigan now also leads the conference in the plus / minus rating, which is the total number of road wins minus the number of home losses. That sa...

As the COVID-19 related pause continues for the Michigan State University basketball team, I have continued to think about and look forward to March Madness. Last week, I shared the results of an analysis that demonstrated that the total number of teams does not make a big impact on the odds for the top teams to win the tournament.  However, it also occurred to me that there other ways in which the tournament could be modified which might impact the results. While we continue to wait for MSU basketball to resume, I decided to explore some of these other formats in more detail. As a refresher, I am using Kenpom efficiency margin data from January 1st, 2021 to both select and seed teams.  I use the same data to generate odds for individual games which act as in input to a Monte Carlo simulation of the full tournament. In my previous post I looked at the impact of changing the size of the tournament from 16 teams up to 357 teams (all of Division I).  In order to complete tha...

The last time we checked on the current status of the Big Ten race and MSU's season, the Spartans were coming off a heart-breaking last second loss to Purdue eleven days ago. Based on the original schedule, Michigan State should have played two games since that loss, at Iowa and versus Indiana. But, a COVID-19 outbreak in the Spartan locker room has forced the team to hit the pause button for now. The next scheduled game versus Illinois has also now been postponed . At this point, there are still a lot of questions. Will those three missed games actually get made up? For now, all the talk seems to be that they will, but with nine total Big Ten games already postponed and with Nebraska also headed for a pause , the odds that all 140 conference games will played before the Big Ten Tournament seems vanishingly small. Once the MSU pause is over, what will the Spartans actually look like? Having a few days off to rest and practice might be a good thing for the Green and White. Coach Iz...

Back in the late summer, when it looked like there would be no Big Ten football and perhaps no college football at all, I decided to run a simulation of the full, original college football season as a fun experiment. As a first pass, this simulation provided good odds and statistics about how the original schedule would have played out. As a second pass, it provided a large number of potential snap shots of that aborted season. As an exercise, I decided to select a single full season simulation result and I started "reporting" on that result back in the fall. The idea was that this single season result was actually playing out somewhere in a " parallel universe. " Once the real season started, I pressed the pause button on that project. Now that the actual college football season in this universe is complete, I thought that it would be fun to " complete the circle " and give a final summary of the results from my favorite parallel universe. Regular Season ...

With MSU's basketball season on a (hopefully) short pause due to COVID-19, I have been thinking a lot about the NCAA Tournament. One topic, of course, is whether MSU will actually be playing in said tournament in March. For today, I will give a simple answer to that question: if the Spartans start playing better and can approach their potential soon, then yes, I think that they will make the tournament. If they do not, then they won't. As for today, I have some thoughts related to the structure of the actual tournament itself. As most sports fans know, the current NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament consists of 68 total teams, 32 of which are conference champion automatic qualifiers and 36 of which are "at-large" teams selected by the Selection Committee. However, the tournament has not always been the same size that it is today. The current structure has only been in place since 2011. From 2001 to 2010, the tournament consisted of only 65 teams, which was an increas...

For those of us who have been MSU fans for a while, we have experienced a lifetime worth of crazy finishes in the past 20-30 years. MSU has both won and lost on buzzer beaters and other crazy late game situations. I recall watching Korie Lucious hitting the game winner in the second round of the 2010 NCAA tournament which paved the way for Coach Izzo's sixth Final Four. But, I also remember Kenny Anderson of Georgia Tech hitting a shot (after the buzzer) to knock Jud Heathcote's Spartans out of the Sweet 16 in Steve Smith's senior year of 1990, which very likely cost Jud a chance at his second Final Four, if not second title. I could go on to list a dozen examples of MSU wins or loses in the final seconds of a game. Many of those wins were glorious and many of the losses were crushing. But, the lesson is essentially the same.  You win some. You lose some.  In general, the team that wins is the one that makes the most plays at the end of the game. Last Friday Purdue made tho...