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.
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| 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.
Third, Table 1 lists the current "luck" for each Big Ten team. I define luck as the difference between the actual number of wins and the expected number of wins so far, based on the retroactive spreads derived from the Kenpom adjusted efficiencies of each team.
Finally, the table contains the overall strength of schedule advantage/disadvantage relative to the conference average as well as the conference strength of resume.
I calculate strength of resume as the difference between the actual number of wins for each team and the number of expect wins that a reference team with a Kenpom adjusted efficiency margin of 19.00 would have with the same schedule to date.
Nebraska and Purdue are currently tied for first place in the standings, but Nebraska has played the tougher schedule with an impressive +3.04 conference strength of resume.
Michigan State, Illinois, and Michigan are a game back with records of 4-1. The Spartans and Fighting Illini have similar strengths of resume (+1.14) while the Wolverines are lagging behind (+0.32).
Rounding out the top half of the conference are four teams at 3-2: Wisconsin, Minnesota, UCLA, and Indiana. The Badgers have the highest strength of resume (+1.04) followed by Minnesota (+0.64). UCLA (+0.06), and Indiana (-0.37) have 3-2 records which are quantitatively less impressive.
But the raw standings do not necessarily reflect the true state of the Big Ten race. To answer that question, I turn to the updated results of my Big Ten full season simulation, which is shown below in Table 2.
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| Table 2: Odds to win or share the Big Ten regular season title and the win distributions for those winning teams as of Jan. 13, 2026. |
Note that the changes in odds are relative to the simulation results from just before Christmas when each Big Ten team had played just two conference games.
The Michigan Wolverines' upset home loss to Wisconsin has put a major dent in the Wolverines hopes of winning the conference. Michigan is still barely the No. 1 overall team in Kenpom efficiency, but Purdue is not far behind.
My simulation has the Boilermakers (35.6%) as a slight favorite to win or share the Big Ten title over Michigan (34.5%) by just over one percentage point.
Illinois (14.2%) and Nebraska (11.6%) are in a tight race for third place and Michigan State (3.7%) currently has the fifth best odds to win at least a share of the Big Ten crown.
Despite the fact that we are not even to the midway point of January, the team with the next best odds to win the Big Ten is Iowa with odds of around than 1-in-750. The bottom five teams in the conference did not register a single conference title in 500,000 simulation cycles. There are only five teams total that are realistically still in the Big Ten race.
Table 2 also reveals that there is a 70% chance that a record of 18-2 or 17-3 will will needed to claim at least a share of the Big Ten title. The title is shared in just over 27% of my simulations.
Michigan State is now expected to win 13.77 conference games total. For comparison, Michigan (16.23) and Purdue (16.19) have the highest expected win total, followed by Illinois (15.23) and Nebraska (14.85). There is over a two-game gap between MSU and the team with the sixth best expected win total: Wisconsin (11.01).
The Spartans are projected to be favored in all but three of the remaining regular season games. In the scenario where all the projected favorites win out, Purdue would run the table and finish in first place at 20-0. Michigan would finish conference play at 18-2, and there would be a four-way tie for third place with Illinois, Michigan State, and Nebraska all finished will a record of 16-4.
In this scenario, the head-to-head tiebreaker would result in Nebraska earning the No. 3 seed in the Big Ten Tournament, MSU getting the No. 4 seed, and Illinois dropping to the No. 5 seed.
That said, the currently most likely Big Ten Tournament seed for the Spartans in the No. 5 seed. MSU currently has about a 45% chance of earning a top four seed and triple bye in the conference postseason tournament.
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. 12.
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| Figure 1: Kenpom efficiency scatter plot through Jan. 12, 2026. |
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 range of efficiency profiles 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 (five total) 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 11 total teams in the blue shaded areas and only eight teams in the dark blue area. Michigan State is included in this group of eight teams.
The three teams currently in the light blue fringe contender zone are Vanderbilt, Gonzaga, and Tennessee. Duke is also on the border between the light and dark blue sections. All four teams have similar efficiency profiles in which they have good enough offenses to compete for the title, but potentially suspect defense.
Vanderbilt and Gonzaga and both in the current top six in adjusted offensive efficiency. Duke is not quite as strong on offense, but the Blue Devils are more balanced. This put them into a similar historical category as teams like the 2015 Duke team, the 2018 Villanova team, and the 2024 UConn team.
Tennessee is technically in the light blue region, but there are no clear examples of teams with similar profiles which went on win the National Title.
In the darker blue section of Figure 1, there are three teams that jump out with a unique combination of elite offenses and defenses in the upper right-hand corner of the graph: Michigan, Iowa State, and Arizona. These teams currently hold down the top three spots in Kenpom and are most historically similar to the 2025 Florida team and the 2019 Virginia team.
There is a second trio of teams that also have good balance on both ends of the court: Houston, Florida, and UConn. These teams do not have offenses that are quite as good as Duke or Gonzaga, but all three teams have better defense. These teams are most historically similar to the 2007 Florida squad.
Of the eight primary contenders, Michigan State is located in a unique position on the graph. The Spartans have the third best defense in the country, but the weakest offense of any on the contenders.
Historically, MSU's current profile best matches the 2004 UConn team. They are also a slightly less offensively potent version of last year's Michigan State team.
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 Purdue, Illinois, and BYU are all ranked in the top 11 overall in Kenpom, but all three teams are not strong enough on defense to make the list of current contenders. Undefeated Nebraska also does not make the cut due to their defense.
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.
If MSU can continue to improve as the season marches on, there is a good chance that be the end of the season, the 2025-26 version of the Spartans could start to resemble last year's team or even the Final Four teams from 2019 or 2001.
Regardless, the data shows that Michigan State is one of the few teams in the National with a legitimate shot to advance to the final weekend and win the National Title.
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