Welcome to the second of five installments where I run 10,000 simulations of each conference’s schedule to get a sense for which teams have a viable shot at winning their conference’s regular-season title. For those late to the party, see yesterday’s post, where we learned not to hand over the Big West’s NIT auto-bid to […]

As done in this space last season, it’s time to look at how conference races might shake out based on what my ratings say to this point. The ground rules are similar to last year: I’ll use the current ratings for each team, simulate the conference season 10,000 times and record which team gets the […]

There are places in America where you can’t just go to a college basketball game on a whim. A trip must be planned, time off must be taken from work, and you need to get someone to watch the dog for a few days. No town has Scobey, Montana beaten in this regard. According to […]

Baylor beat BYU 86-83 on Saturday in the game of the weekend as determined by FanMatch. I was there. Here is what I saw. Perry Jones is good at playing basketball The best thing about the game-watching experience was witnessing Perry Jones. Some games, he is more potential than production. In this game, he was […]

I have 828 play-by-plays from last season where the final margin was single-digits and for which the play-by-play has clean substitution data. “Clean” meaning that according to the play-by-play there were five players on the floor at all times. (This does not necessarily mean it’s accurate. There are probably some glitches as the curiously low […]

The Murray State Racers went to the FedEx Forum and beat the Memphis Tigers 76-72 yesterday. It was a nice upset, the kind that will give the Racers at-large cachet, but the bigger story now is the rest of Murray State’s schedule. They play in the Ohio Valley Conference, a league that is never terribly […]

The Utah Utes basketball program currently ranks 12th in the country in all-time wins. They were in the 1998 championship and actually led Kentucky at the half. They play in an arena that hosted arguably the most famous game ever played. But this season, their basketball team is bad. Not bad in the way that […]

There have been a few questions about the influence of the preseason ratings and how this works itself out of the system early in the season. This is handled the same as last season, the details of which are here. You can just subtract one day from the key dates mentioned in that post. One […]

[Update: 144 people responded. The median response was 27 minutes. Thanks to everyone that participated.] As mentioned in a post a couple of weeks ago, I’d like to do some crowdsourcing from the people that have been generous enough to purchase a subscription to this site. Figuring that those folks are better informed than the […]

The 13th annual Big Ten/ACC Challenge gets underway this evening. Based on Monday’s ratings, here are the chances of the favored team winning each game… Tuesday Michigan at Virginia (62%) Northwestern at Georgia Tech (52%) Illinois (55%) at Maryland Miami at Purdue (79%) Clemson (55%) at Iowa Duke at Ohio State (78%) Wednesday Penn State […]