I’m using my ratings and Bill James’ log5 formula to estimate the chances of each participating team advancing to a particular round of its conference tournament.

Big West Conference
Location: Anaheim, Ca. (Honda Center)
Dates: March 13-15
Chance of bid thief: zero
Current kPOY: Alan Williams, UC Santa Barbara

Projections:

                    Semis  Final  Champ
1 UC Irvine          85.8   60.5   35.8
2 UC Santa Barbara   80.8   56.8   32.9
3 Long Beach St.     71.7   29.5   12.7
4 Hawaii             69.3   27.9   12.3
5 Cal St. Northridge 30.7    7.5    2.0
7 Cal Poly           19.2    7.2    1.9
6 Cal St. Fullerton  28.3    6.5    1.6
8 UC Riverside       14.2    4.2    0.9

The sole purpose for this tournament is so that Alan Williams can right the injustice of the conference standings which had UCSB one game behind UC Irvine. These two teams are virtually identical and they’re the best two teams in the conference. May the team with statistically-best center in the country win. And that player is not UCI’s Mamadou N’diaye.

That wraps up log5 season. All in all, it wasn’t as interesting as I’d like. The favorites were entirely composed of one and two-seeds, and just seven two-seeds at that. The tournaments themselves have been a little more interesting, with hefty favorites Vermont and Davidson falling in the America East and SoCon, respectively. In addition, both Mount St. Mary’s and Milwaukee improbably won two road games to claim their respective conference championships. Of the two, Milwaukee’s four game run to the crown was by far more improbable, given a mere 0.4% chance of happening. That should easily stand as the craziest occurrence of championship fortnight.