Team Pages added for Conf Tourney Forecasts

I decided to go ahead and add the team pages that include the conference tournament forecasts in the simulations (as described in the previous post). I may add more info for next week. Just click on a team's name on the page:

http://www.rpiforecast.com/ct/index.html

Projections INCLUDING Conference Tournaments

There have been many requests to incorporate the conference tournaments into the simulations. I have started doing that on a weekly basis on a separate page:

http://www.rpiforecast.com/ct/index.html

I will update this on Mondays to start. We'll see how that goes.

Here's the procedure:
1. Run the simulations as usual.
2. At the end of each simulated regular season, sort teams in each conference (or division) based on its record.
3. From the conference records in #2, seed the teams for the conference tournaments
4. If two or more teams are tied, the seeds are randomly picked between the tied teams (Learning and incorporating all of the complex tiebreakers for every conference is just too time consuming)
5. For all 30 conferences that hold tournaments, run a simulated tournament based on the specific structure and home court advantages of each tournament.
6. Calculate RPIs, SOS, and the other usual stats for the entire season including the tournaments.
7. Run the simulations 10,000 times

Anyway, eventually I'll add individual team pages (maybe next week) that include the conf tournament forecasts. Items included will be things like probability of winning tournament, expected number of wins in the tournament, etc.

BracketBuster update

I updated the Bracketbuster RPI forecasts. Remember that these are forecasts of what the RPIs, records, etc. will be on Sunday, Feb. 3, which is the day that the big wigs get together to decide the initial matchups in the Bracket Buster games. As usual, the W-L forecasts are rounded to the nearest digit since they are expectations. If you want to figure out exactly what they are, simply add up the probabilities of winning over the remaining games to get the expected number of wins. The expected numer of losses is then easy to infer. Here's the page:

http://www.rpiforecast.com/bb.html

BracketBusters

For those of you who are interested in the ESPN BracketBuster matchups, I performed a little exercise. The beauty of the RPI Forecast methodology is that not only can you forecast the RPI at the end of the season, you can predict it for any future date.

With that in mind, I decided to provide a forecast of what it will look like on February 3, 2008. That is the date that the powers that be will get together to decide the initial parings for the Bracket Buster matchups. I'm fairly certain that the RPI is only a very small factor in those decisions, with money (TV ad revenues) being the largest. Nevertheless, records and RPIs are likely to have some influence on the decision.

Anyhow, here is the page with the teams sorted by RPI Forecast (for February 3) and separated into the 50 home teams and 50 road teams so that you can make your own predictions. Enjoy:

http://www.rpiforecast.com/bb.html

I will NOT be updating that particular page daily. If I make any futher updates, I'll make it known.

EDIT: The page temporarily reverted to one that I had from last season. It has now been fixed.