As you watch games today, you will likely see a breakdown of records by conference. With the Big East leading the way with 11 teams, they will likely get a lot of the focus. They posted a respectable 7-4 up to this point, but are they the most successful conference right now? How do we determine that?
For example, the Big Ten's record looks pretty solid at 5-2 so far. However, with 3 protected seeds amongst the group, you would expect to see a handful of early wins. In order to truly see how well a conference has done so far, you must compare them to some sort of baseline expected result.
If you look back at the seed-by-seed results ever since the field expanded to 64, you see the following 1st round winning percentages:
1 seeds - 100%
2 seeds - 96%
3 seeds - 85%
4 seeds - 79%
5 seeds - 67%
6 seeds - 69%
7 seeds - 63%
8 seeds - 46%
9 seeds - 54%
10 seeds - 37%
11 seeds - 31%
12 seeds - 33%
13 seeds - 21%
14 seeds - 15%
15 seeds - 4%
16 seeds - 0%
Based on those percentages, a conference like the A-10 (with seeds of 6, 7, & 12) would be expected to win 1.7 games. This is easy to calculate. 6 seed = 0.69, 7 seed = 0.63, 12 seed = 0.33
.69 + .63 + .33 = 1.7 wins
In reality, the A10 has gone 2-1, so they have slightly outperformed their expected 1.7-1.3 record. By running the numbers on all the conferences, we can see which conferences have truly over performed and which ones have been disappointing.
| Expected Record | Actual Record | % of Wins Expected | ||||
| Colonial | 1.8 - 2.2 | 3-1 | 167% | |||
| ACC | 3.2 - 1.8 | 4-1 | 125% | |||
| Pac 10 | 2.4 - 1.6 | 3-1 | 125% | |||
| A10 | 1.7 - 1.3 | 2-1 | 118% | |||
| Big Ten | 4.4 - 2.6 | 5 -2 | 114% | |||
| Big East | 8.0 - 3.0 | 7-4 | 88% | |||
| Big 12 | 3.4 - 1.6 | 3-2 | 88% | |||
| Mountain West | 2.3 - 0.7 | 2-1 | 87% | |||
| SEC | 3.3 - 1.7 | 2-3 | 61% | |||
| CUSA | 0.8 - 1.2 | 0-2 | 0% | |||
A few notes on the table above:
- % of Expected Wins is calculated as (actual wins) / (expected wins)
- First Four games were included. In those cases, games were between evenly matched seeds, so I simply gave each team a 50% chance of winning. This is why the Colonial has played 4 games with only 3 teams. (VCU won the First Four game against USC and then beat Georgetown in the round of 64)
- Only multibid leagues were considered. One bid leagues are way too small a sample size. For example, Morehead State won as a 13 seed, giving the OVC a 303% in the far right column.
I like your table. Would be interesting to see this table, round by round, over the past few years.
ReplyDeleteAs a note: In your example of A10 performance, you mention that they "out performed" what was expected. Not really. They got as close to what was calculated as possible. I would say they, Big 12, and MWC were all on target as expected. The other conferences were either one game over or one under what the calculated expectation was to be.
ShockTalk, obviously in the real world, there is no such thing as 1.7 wins. This means that we have to round off expectations to the closest whole number. Pointing out that the A10 was only expected to win 1.7 games does indeed show that 2 wins was a slight overachievement.
ReplyDeleteThe easiest way to illustrate this is to look at the Colonial & PAC 10 results. Both conferences went 3-1. Both conferences were expected to go 2-2. It appears that both exceeded expectations by 1 game. However, only when you look at the decimals do you realize that the Colonial was a much bigger surprise to get to 3-1 than the PAC 10 was. Decimals matter.