Big 12 Initial Projection - a B I G uphill battle for KU!

I finally got my DPPI up an running. It is new and improved this season. Last season it projected the winner correctly in about 81% of games. I am hoping to improve on that this season. I am calling today the beginning of the Big 12 season even though OU defeated TCU over a week ago. Incidentally, the DPPI was 0.3 points off in the margin projection for that game. Not a bad start. I know KU is ranked 5th in the AP and coaches poll. That is good and we very well may deserve that as the season progresses. But the computer algorithm is emotionless and calculates only with the data it is given which is the data for the games played. And KU is currently ranked 6th in the Big 12. Our schedule is looking less and less impressive as time goes on. Kentucky is 1-4 and Creighton just lost to Marquette. Gonzaga has only played 3 games but still looks to be in the mix for a top 2 spot. Without getting into the gory detail, my DPPI actually has two separate (but related )power rankings. The first is a straight-up raw power ranking based on the mean performance of the teams. The second as a standard deviation adjustment (sort of a consistency adjustment) which can significantly impact the probability of winning. So it is more of a true predictive ranking. When I cite only DPPI rank, I am referring to the ranking with the standard deviation adjustment. It's value is equivalent to the percent of games that team would win if they played every other team once. So, Baylor has a rating of 0.960 which means if they played every other team once, they would win 96% of those games. KU is ranked 37th in both rankings.

So, where does the DPPI see Kansas. Presently, KU is projected to win 9.4 games. I am praying that KU's performances to date have been early season jitters and learning and we are a much better team than we have shown. KU played the 196th ranked NDSU and won by 3. We played 91 ranked Kentucky and won by 3 and we lost by 12 to Gonzaga when we were projected to lose by 8. I suspect we are better than the 37th best team in the country but we have not played like it. Also, if Creighton and especially Kentucky can make a surge, that will obviously help KU's ranking.

So without further adieu, here are the metrics for KU.

Projected wins: 9. 4
Probability of winning outright Big 12 Championship: 0.2%
Probability of winning at least a share of the title: 0.8%

Baylor is the overwhelming favorite with an 81% probability of winning at least a share of the title and a 65.7% probability of winning it outright. See the chart by clicking on the link below.

Initial Big 12 Projections

I really hate to say it but that is what it looks like at this point and the numbers don't lie. As you stated hopefully the hawks will start to play better.

Hairy, it is quite clearly true that the numbers do not lie. But it is also true that the numbers can be quite ignorant. K-State just defeated Iowa St. in the battle of the worst two teams in the Big 12. K-State was an 8 point underdog yet won by 9 points or almost 2 standard deviations. Such is college basketball and why I love the challenge of building an algorithm for a sport that is so dependent on wildly divergent performances. I would never have guessed that K-State could go into Ames and win by 9. This is a crazy sport in normal times and doubly so, it seems, this season. How fun,. Tomorrow, we have No. 8 vs. No. 7., TCU vs. Oklahoma St. FWIW, OSU is a 5.3 point favorite against TCU tomorrow in Stillwater.

Great point about the "wildly divergent performances." I saw KSU early in the season and they had no flow on offense. They only had 1 person, D. Gordan, that could make a shot. They go into Ames where they made shots and ran decent offense in the first half.

Hey, Corpus! Was tonight's win at TTU one of your model's 9.4 wins?

It was a 0.4 win. So we improved 6/10ths of a game with this win plus a slight boost from improvement in the rankings. We will be projected over 10 wins now.