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.
Pac-12 Conference
Location: Las Vegas (MGM Grand)
Dates: March 12-15
Chance of bid thief: 6 percent
Current kPOY: Nick Johnson, Arizona
Projections:
Qtrs Semis Final Champ 1 Arizona 100 81.0 69.9 54.4 2 UCLA 100 54.5 30.5 10.7 3 Arizona St. 100 58.2 27.2 8.7 7 Oregon 76.5 39.7 23.0 8.4 8 Utah 72.1 16.2 10.5 5.3 6 Stanford 84.3 39.6 17.3 5.1 4 California 100 52.5 9.5 3.4 5 Colorado 76.2 41.1 8.4 3.3 9 Washington 27.9 2.8 1.2 0.3 10 Oregon St. 23.5 5.9 1.8 0.3 12 USC 23.8 6.4 0.5 0.09 11 Wash. St. 15.7 2.2 0.3 0.02
I don’t know if the Pac-12 tournament has ever been highly-anticipated and I’m not sure this one is either, but there are some reasons to monitor the events in Vegas. We’ll get some more data on Arizona, whose offense has been inconsistent in a post-Brandon Ashley world. The worst of the offense has shown up in true road games, so I’m anxious to see what the Wildcats look like on a neutral court against difficult competition.
Oregon has the appearance of being hot, but let’s not forget that during its seven-game winning streak, the Ducks been at home five times. Because of this, their ranking has only risen from 32 to 25 over that time. Still, don’t get carried away with that seven-seed. The Ducks are capable of winning the whole thing with a break here and there.
Finally, Utah is on the opposite end of the RPI spectrum as UMass. Just one of forty-something systems ranks Utah worse than the RPI does (83rd). Hence, just three of some 96 brackets at Bracket Matrix list Utah in the field. Hopefully someone sees the insanity of relying on a single formula for the objective-data portion of the selection process.