Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

A few 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. The Michigan State Spartans opened 2026 with a tough loss on the road at Nebraska. MSU followed up the loss with a blowout win over USC and a closer-than-expected win over Northwestern, both at home.  Michigan State sits at 4-1 a quarter of the way through Big Ten play prior to Tuesday night's game versus Indiana. Table 1 below is what I refer to as the enhanced Big Ten standings. It includes the current Big Ten record of each team in addition to several other pieces of data.  Table 1:  Enhanced Big Ten standings as of Jan. 13, 2026 First, it contains the current Kenpom rankings and adjusted efficiency margins (AdjEM) for each team. Second, it contains the "plus/minus" for each team. The value is equal to the number of road wins minus the number of homes losses....

A few weeks ago, I introduced my annual Big Ten basketball preview where I broke down the concept of strength of schedule, performed a deep dive on the conference slate for the Michigan State Spartans, and gave the current results of my state-of-the-art Big Ten basketball simulation. But there are other statistics that are useful to understand basketball at a deeper level. Today, I would like to reintroduce a concept referred to as the "Four Factors" of basketball success. The Four Factors have been discussed in great detail elsewhere. Briefly the four factors on both offense and defense are: 1. Effective field goal percentage (eFGPct) 2. Turnover percentage (TOPct) 3. Offensive rebounding percentage (ORPct) 4. Free-throw rate (FTRate) Basically, the four factors account for how well a team shoots or defends shots (eFGPct), the ability of a team to create (or lose) shots opportunities (TOPct and ORPct), and the ability of a team to score or avoid points from the free throw li...