Daily Updates This Week

I'm going to be traveling much of this week and will not be able to update the site very early in the day starting on Wednesday, but will try to get the updates in when I can.

Podcast of interview

You can hear a podcast of my interview on the radio at this website:

http://usuaggies.com/?p=1008

Media Alert

I will be appearing on KVNU's radio program "Full Court Press" at 610 on the AM dial tonight at 6:00pm Mountain time zone. Those of you that aren't in Northern Utah/Southern Idaho can listen online at http://www.610kvnu.com . Fair warning: I will be focusing on Utah State's RPI/BracketBuster outlook, etc. I think they will be taking phone calls.

Today's update

Today's update will be a little later in the day than usual.

Update on Friday

FYI, Friday's numbers may be posted a little late in the day.

New Features

I have added two features in the past few days:

1. Bracket Busters RPI Projections:

For all 102 Bracket Busters teams, I've started projecting what their RPIs will be on February 1st. That is the day before the first matchups will be announced. This should give you some idea of where teams will likely stand at that point. The address is: http://www.rpiforecast.com/bb.html (bb = bracket busters)

2. Protrade

For all of the NCAA basketball teams on Protrade.com, I have started projecting their end of season fantasy earnings. This involves doing something similar to what I do in the conference tournament simulations, but I include NCAA tournament and NIT games. There is an explanation of the methodology at the website which is here: http://www.rpiforecast.com/protrade.html

Each of these two features will be updated at least weekly, and probably more frequently than that.

Conference tournaments

I've started making (at least) weekly forecasts which include simulated conference tournaments. It is always a pain to go through all 30 conference tournament formats each year and figure out how they have changed since last year. If you see any problems, let me know. Here's what I do:

After each of the 10,000 simulated seasons:

1. Figure out seeds based on records
2. Run a simulated tournament
3. Calculate RPI for that one simulation

I repeat this for all 10,000 simulations. For each team, I report RPI broken down by different end-of-season records which will include every scenario that happened in the 10,000 simulations. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here is the page for Utah State of the WAC:

http://www.rpiforecast.com/teams/ct/Utah%20St..html

Through Games of Dec 20, the WAC conference tournament looks like it will help USU on average by a few spots. Without taking into account the tournament, their Expected RPI is about 46. Once the simulated tournament is added, it becomes about 43 - a slight improvement. For some teams, the conference tourneys will be a huge boost. This is especially true for teams which have byes until later rounds. One of the problems with conference tournaments (at least in terms of RPIs) is that teams with high seeds are paired up with low seeded teams until the final rounds of the tournament. This will tend to hurt their RPIs even if they win. If I were on the chairman of a mid-major conference, given the choice, I would choose a format with byes for the top seeds.