Missouri Valley Conference Tournament Predictions – 2013

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Monte

I’ve already covered the Big South and Horizon tournaments, as well as the A-Sun, Northeast, Patriot, OVC, and WCC. The Missouri Valley, along with Bucknell, Belmont, and the WCC power duo of Gonzaga and Saint Mary’s already covered, sports two potential Bid Stealers as both Creighton and Wichita State should be in the NCAA Tournament regardless of what happens in Arch Madness this week.

There is, however, a good chance that a team outside of the MVC’s top pair takes home the tournament title and accompanying ticket to the big dance. Northern Iowa, Illinois St, Indiana St., and Evansville combined have a nearly 20% chance to win the title, with each having a better than 3% chance. For Creighton and Wichita State, they still have plenty to play for. Right now, both teams are looking at a seed in the middle of the pack, and they want to do everything they can to move off the 8 and 9 seed lines. A couple wins in the conference tournament could shift them into the 5-7 seeds and greatly increase their chances of reaching the Sweet 16.

SdTeamQtrsSemisFinalsChamp
1Creighton89.372.146.9
2Wichita State90.962.733.0
3Northern Iowa51.219.67.5
6Illinois State48.816.45.6
5Indiana State52.513.73.1
4Evansville47.510.43.1
9Drake54.26.72.40.4
8Bradley45.84.01.40.3
10Southern Illinois62.86.81.20.1
7Missouri State37.22.30.10.0

Next up: The Southern, MAAC, and Sun Belt conferences get under way Friday.

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Bid Stealers – 2013 Conference Tournament Edition

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Monte

Earlier this season, I looked at those teams who could potentially shrink the at-large pool by getting upset in their conference tournament. These potential “Bid Stealers” are generally teams from mid-major conferences where they are the only viable at-large candidate. When they don’t win the conference tournament, that automatic bid is going to a team that otherwise would have no chance of going dancing and therefore they are stealing a bid from another at-large candidate.

As we enter Conference Tournament season, it’s time to refresh that look at this year’s potential Bid Stealers. My process for determining auto and at-large bids relies on a simulation of the remainder of the season followed by an application of my Achievement S-Curve to determine NCAA Tournament bids. My Achievement S-Curve (ASC) is based on what I think the criteria for selection should be, and is not trying to mimic the selection committee.

Here are this year’s potential Bid Stealers: Continue reading →

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A-Sun, Northeast, Patriot, OVC, and WCC Conference Tournament Predictions – 2013

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Monte

This is the second group of conference tournament I’ll take a look at. Earlier I looked at the Big South and Horizon tournaments.

The Atlantic Sun is mostly a two-team conference. Florida Gulf Coast ranks as the best team in the conference (#173 in my predictive rankings), but Mercer is close behind (#184) while grabbing the top seed and having the benefit of hosting the conference tournament. That is enough to make Mercer a better bet than the field here at 54%. FGCU is the only other team in double digits (23%), as far as their chances to go dancing. Continue reading →

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Big South and Horizon Conference Tournament Predictions – 2013

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Monte

First up among this year’s conference tournaments are the Big South and the Horizon as both leagues kicked off with their 1st Round games today.

The Big South is one of the weakest leagues in the country, and my predictive ratings rank just one team in the top 190 teams in the country: Charleston Southern at #164, making them the favorite in the Big South. With host Coastal Carolina and the next-strongest team UNC-Asheville both getting upset tonight, the only other team with a reasonable chance at unseating Charleston Southern is Gardner-Webb, clocking in at a 19% chance at snagging the Big South’s automatic bid (which will definitely increase after tonight’s upsets). Continue reading →

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Conference Tournament Predictions – 2013

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Monte

Conference tournaments got under way today with the 1st Round of the Big South and Horizon tournaments. This year I’m going to put my predictions on “paper” and compare them to some other predictions out there, notably Ken Pomeroy’s Log5 predictions and Team Rankings conference tourney predictions. If you know of any other posted predictions out there, let me know.

My predictions as well as KenPom and TeamRankings give the percentage chance of each team advancing to each round of every conference tournament. To grade each set of predictions, I’ll use the sum of squared error for each game winner. For example, let’s take Ken Pomeroy’s prediction of Charleston Southern in the Big South tournament:

                    Qtrs Semis Final Champ
1S Char Southern     100  77.2  50.5  31.6

So Charleston Southern has a 100% chance of reaching the quarterfinals (they have a bye), a 77% chance of reaching the Semifinals, 51% chance at making the final, and a 32% chance of grabbing the conference’s automatic bid. If Charleston Southern were to make the semifinals, for instance, KenPom’s prediction would receive (1 – .772)^2 “error points”, which comes out to .052. The fewer the error points, the better the predictions did. If, for instance, Longwood reaches the semis, KenPom’s ratings would suffer for their 2% prediction of that happening. That would give (1 – .020)^2, or .960 error points. In fact, Longwood did pull of the 1st Round upset and is just one game from reaching the semis.

It’s finally March and I see no reason why we need to wait for Selection Sunday to fill out some brackets when we have 31 perfectly good conference tournaments to predict. Let the Madness begin.

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The Achievement S-Curve: 2/21/2013

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Monte

It’s time to re-introduce the Achievement S-Curve for the 2013 season. For those of you that are new, I’ll give a quick recap in this post but check out previous posts that go into more detail about the system (try this and this and this for starters).

The Achievement S-Curve is a descriptive rating system that attempts to rate teams based on what they have accomplished. It is a subtle yet important difference from a predictive rating system. While a predictive system attempts to answer the question “who would win if these two teams played today?” a descriptive system answers “who has accomplished the most in the games they’ve already played?”.

An example is probably the best way to demonstrate the differences between the two systems. Let’s take a real-life example. My predictive rating system says that New Mexico is the 33rd best team in the country. That is, there are 32 teams I’d favor over the Lobos, but I’d pick them to beat every other team. Pitt, meanwhile, is the 7th best team. Only six teams in the nation would be favored over the Panthers today. However, New Mexico is 22-4 against the 29th-hardest schedule thus far while Pitt hasn’t fared as well with a  20-7 record against a very similar schedule (24th-most difficult). It is clear that New Mexico has “achieved” more thus far this season than Pitt has. The Lobos have earned a higher seed than Pitt, despite the fact that Pitt would beat them more times than not. Continue reading →

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Bid Stealers

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Monte

With the Super Bowl behind us, it’s time for me to turn my attention to college hoops for a couple months.

As we approach March, it’s all about teams trying to claw their way into the tournament. As you surely know, there are two ways to get into the dance: win your conference or get a coveted at-large berth.

Most of the time, the winner of the conference’s automatic bid has little bearing on other teams. In the Big Ten, if Indiana doesn’t win the bid, Michigan might. Or Ohio State. Or Michigan State. Regardless, those teams were getting in anyway. Conversely, in the traditional one-bid leagues, like the SWAC, it doesn’t matter who wins. The champion is going dancing and the rest of the conference is going home.

But there are the select few who can really ruin a bubble team’s Selection Sunday. The Bid Stealers. These are the teams that have a chance to win an at-large bid, but unlike the power conferences where the alternatives for the auto bid are themselves at-large locks, when these bid-stealers lose its a team that otherwise had no chance to make the tournament that takes the conference’s auto bid. These teams, should they get an at-large bid, are essentially stealing a bid from the at-large pool. (Seth Greenberg, above, is not happy that a bid-stealer took a bid from his Virginia Tech Hokies.) Continue reading →

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Evaluating QBs: Peyton Manning is a Better Playoff Quarterback than Tom Brady

Posted on February 3, 2013 by Monte

Based on their respective records this might sound crazy. Brady has three rings, five total Super Bowl appearances, and a record 17 playoff victories. Manning on the other hand: a below .500 playoff record, just one Super Bowl ring, and a record eight “one-and-outs”. How could anybody in their right mind choose the latter over the former? It’s amazing what a little perspective can do. Let’s start from the beginning.

(If you haven’t read the first three parts of this series, they introduce and explain all of the concepts used here: Part I, Part II, and Part III.) Continue reading →

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Evaluating QBs: The Truth Behind QB Records

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Monte

*UPDATE: I’ve temporarily changed the blog theme so that the tables in this post will be sortable and searchable.*

With the tedious boring stuff out of the way (if you missed the boring parts, here is boring part 1 and part 2), it’s time for the payoff. I’ll post some results and comment on some of the more interesting findings.

First, the caveats, the fine print. All games from 2000-2012 are included, regular season is assumed unless otherwise noted. From last post, we defined the “QB of record” for each game; that is instead of the starting QB we’ll use the QB who had the most dropbacks for his team in each game (dropbacks = pass attempts + sacks). Again from the previous posts, we defined different phases of the game, which we’ll measure by Expected Points Added (EPA)–despite having my own expected points model, I decided to borrow Brian Burke’s more well-known EP model for this series. Those phases are defense, special teams and offense; most of the time here we’ll be dividing offense into two parts: QB EPA, which are plays where the QB is the passer or rusher, and Non-QB EPA which is all other offensive plays. While part 1 showed that QBs have control over QB EPA but little to no influence over Non-QB EPA, Defensive EPA, or Special Teams EPA that should not be confused with QBs having all control over QB EPA. While that is heavily influenced by the quarterback, receivers, lineman, running backs, the opposing defense, etc. all have some impact as well on these plays.

With the disclaimers out of the way, let’s dive right in. Continue reading →

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Evaluating QBs: It’s All About Context

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Monte

In part 1 of my Evaluating QBs series, we looked at what makes teams win and which of those things quarterbacks have control over. While wins can be useful to separate quarterbacks, that is only because they are correlated with the underlying factors that explain wins. Once we separate out and control for those factors, QB wins provide no further information.

Now that we have shown that QBs have some control over the plays they are directly involved in but no influence over other facets of the game–defense, special teams, and other offensive plays–we can now look at how many wins we’d expect each player to have based only on what they have control over.

We can get at this two ways: directly and indirectly. The direct way is to look at how often quarterbacks win based on their EPA (again, using Brian Burke’s Expected Points from Advanced NFL Stats). The indirect way is to look at how often quarterbacks win based on the EPA of everything else, what I’ll call “support”. That is, the sum of the EPA of the quarterback’s team defense, special teams, and non-QB offensive EPA. Continue reading →

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