Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

It has been a very long time since the Michigan State Spartans basketball team tasted victory.  If you combine the almost three-week COVID pause and a four-game losing streak, MSU officially went a full month without a win. On Saturday night, the Green and White defeated last place Nebraska by 10 points to officially get off of the schneid. Earlier in the week, MSU traveled to Iowa City and came close to stealing a victory against the top ten Hawkeyes. But, Josh Langford's shot to tie the game rimmed out and the Spartans were once again denied a potentially momentum-altering if not season-altering win. As it stands now, MSU is 3-7 in Big Ten play at the half-way point of the season, assuming all of the postponed games are made up. On some level, a close loss on the road to a ranked team followed by a double digit wins feels like progress. On the other hand, MSU's performance against Nebraska did not inspire a lot of confidence that the Spartans are improving quickly enough to ...

The 2020-21 season of college basketball like no other.  The impact of COVID-19 has already caused a shortened preseason, multiple postponed games, and multi-week team shutdowns. Another obvious impact is the lack of fans in Big Ten arenas and in arenas across the nation. There has been a lot of discussion about how much impact this lack of fans is having on the results of games. So far, MSU has only played three home games in Big Ten play, and the Spartans have lost two of those three games (versus Purdue and Wisconsin). It seems that the advantage of playing the Breslin Center may be decreased, but with a sample size of only three games, it is hard to say for sure. Is there a way to try to quantify this effect? One piece of data to look at is the overall win percentage of all Big Ten home teams. As of February 4th. Big Ten teams are 44-28 overall, which is a win percentage of 61.1 percent.  Historically, this turns out to low side of normal in Big Ten play.  Figure 1 be...

The good news is that MSU basketball is finally back. The bad news is that that is the only good news. Since the last odds update, the Spartans have played and lost two road games to Rutgers and Ohio State, both in blowout fashion. The game at Rutgers was an absolute dumpster fire. The loss at Ohio State was merely bad. Does that, perhaps, count as progress? Maybe? Either way, whether Michigan State has lost in the final seconds or lost by 30, the end result is that MSU is now 2-6 in conference play and the NCAA Tournament streak is officially in serious jeopardy.  The Spartans are now four games under .500. No Izzo team has ever been more than three games under .500.   MSU was 5-8 in late February of 1997, but rallied to win four of the final five games to get to 9-9 and at least earned an NIT bid. In the 2002 season MSU started Big Ten play 0-3, but went 10-3 from there on and made the tournament as a No. 10 seed. Sunday's loss puts Coach Izzo in uncharted territory. I...

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...