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.

Thanks Ken.

As some of you know, Ken Pomeroy has stopped publishing the day-to-day RPI. I just came across this newspaper article about the topic and noticed this bit:

Q: Where should fans go now?
A: There's a Web site called
RPIforecast.com; what the guy does there is he projects the end-of-season RPI.
That's probably more useful.

Thanks for the plug, Ken. Ken has always been more than helpful. I think we both agree that the RPI is not the best measure of a team's quality. My philosophy is that as long as the NCAA is going to use it, why not try to predict what it will be come tourney time.