Two weeks ago, I presented my two-part preview of the Big Ten basketball season, including a ton of data about how the season is likely to play out. In just this short period of time, already a lot has changed.
Most importantly, the Michigan State Spartans traveled to Columbus last Friday and earned a hard-fought win over the Ohio State Buckeyes, 69-62. The Spartans are now 3-0 in conference play, 12-2 overall, and in the midst of a seven-game win streak. Michigan State is tied at the top of the conference with the Michigan Wolverines.
Since Christmas, a lot of the data related to the conference race has shifted. For today's update, let us focus on the updated odds to win or share the Big Ten regular season title as shown below in Table 1.
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| Table 1: Odds to win or share the Big Ten regular season title and the win distributions for those winning teams as of Jan. 6, 2025. |
The Spartans have moved up six-and-a-half percentage points and one spot on the leaderboard since Christmas Eve. My calculations now give Michigan State a 24.4% chance to win or share the Big Ten Title.
These odds are less than ten percentage points behind the new Big Ten leaders, Illinois, with 33.1% odds. The Fighting Illini just returned from a very successful trip to the west coast which included a win at Washington and an eyebrow-raising, 32-point win over Oregon in Eugene.
This win gave a huge boost to the Illini's Kenpom Efficiency (+3.84) and also boosted the conference odds by 22 percentage points. Michigan's Big Ten odds also surged by nine percentage points to 31.1% thanks to a win at USC on Saturday night and a Kenpom-padding blowout win over Western Kentucky earlier in the week.
Purdue (15.4%) currently sits in fourth place on the leaderboard following two fairly easy wins at Minnesota and versus Northwestern.
While the Fighting Illini, Wolverines, Spartans, and Boilermakers all saw their fortunes improve over the past two weeks. A few other teams were not so lucky. Oregon's loss to Illinois dropped the Ducks to sixth place (4.1% odds) on the Big Ten leaderboard.
UCLA (13.5%) dropped 11 percentage points to fall into fifth place after a loss at Nebraska. But the biggest losers this week were the Maryland Terrapins (2.1%). Maryland looked like a bonafide contender two weeks ago, but back-to-back losses at Washington and at Oregon have dropped the Terrapins to just 1-3 in conference play. The odds suggest that this hole is too large to dig out of.
Michigan State is now expected to win 13.51 conference games, which is just behind Illinois (14.14) and Michigan (13.96), but ahead of Purdue (12.92) and UCLA (12.70).
The Spartans are projected to be favored in all but four of the remaining regular season games. In the scenario where all the projected favorites win out, Illinois would win the conference with a 17-3 record. Michigan, Michigan State, and UCLA would tie for second at 16-4 and the Spartans would claim the No. 4 seed in the Big Ten Tournament behind No. 2 UCLA and No. 3 Michigan.
A Closer Look at Kenpom Efficiency
In my analysis of the Michigan State and Big Ten basketball season so far this year, including the section above, I have focused primarily on the Big Ten race. The main input into my simulation and analysis is a the set of possession-by-possession offensive and defensive efficiency that is compiled by Ken Pomeroy.
Efficiency data can be used for a lot more than just the Big Ten race. Today I would like to reintroduce one of my favorite college basketball visuals that provides valuable perspective on where the current Michigan State team is located and where they might be headed.
Figure 1 below is what I refer to as the Kenpom efficiency scatter plot which includes data through Jan. 5.
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| Figure 1: Kenpom efficiency scatter plot through Jan. 5, 2025. |
This figure contains a lot of information. For those who are interested in a more detailed explanation on what the different data points mean, I refer you to one of my previous article.
https://michiganstate.rivals.com/news/michigan-state-hoops-analysis-digging-into-kenpom-efficiency
Briefly, Figure 1 plots the defensive prowess of a given basketball team on the vertical y-axis against the offensive prowess on the horizontal x-axis. A team in the lower right-hand corner is good on offense, but weaker on defense. A team in the upper left-hand corner of the figure is good on defense, but weaker on offense. A team in the upper right-hand corner is good at both.
Team who are good on both offense and defense are naturally contenders to win the National Championship. The shaded blue regions of the figure represent the efficiency profile of past National Champions prior to the start of the NCAA Tournament.
Each National Champion back to 2002 is plotted in Figure 1 as a small, unlabeled blue diamond. Most of these diamonds fall with the darker blue shaded region. However, there are also a handful of outliers with slightly weaker profiles who fall in the lighter blue shaded area.
No team has won the National Championship in the past 23 years or longer if they started the NCAA Tournament with an efficiency profile outside of the blue shaded area in Figure 1.
This makes Figure 1 an excellent reference to quickly determine which teams are legitimate contenders in any given year. The labeled brown triangles in Figure 1 are the teams who currently have an efficiency profile consistent with a national title contender.
Right now there are 15 total teams in the blue shaded areas and nine teams in the dark blue area. This group of 15 contenders include some obvious teams such as Auburn (off scale), Tennessee, Iowa State, and Duke, all four of which are ranked in the top five of both the AP poll and Kenpom.
The group also includes a few teams which are ranked highly by Kenpom, but which are not ranked as high by the AP pollsters. These teams include Houston, Texas A&M, Cincinnati, Illinois, Gonzaga, Maryland, and Michigan.
There are also a few teams which are highly ranked but do not currently have a statistical profile consistent with a National Champion. Mostly notably Alabama, Florida, UConn, and Oklahoma are all ranked in the top 15 in the AP poll, but all four teams are not strong enough on defense to make the list of current contenders.
The profile for Michigan State is currently solidly in the light blue area and just outside the dark blue area. The Spartans are a borderline national title contender with the potential to move into the solid contender (dark blue) region.
The green oval surrounding the Michigan State data point represents the most like area where the Spartans will end up on this chart on Selection Sunday in March, based on the historical movement of Kenpom efficiency at this point in the season.
The current Michigan State team has a profile that resembles a blend of the 2020 team, which was denied a chance to play in the NCAA Tournament due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2014 team which lost UConn in the Regional Finals. Both of those teams were picked by many experts to win it all in the days leading up to Selection Sunday.
If the Spartans can maintain the current level of performance or even build upon it, the 2024-25 season could be another one that Michigan State fans will remember for years to come.
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