Ranking the B1G

I post weekly NCAA men’s basketball rankings over at Badger Bracketology. Every week I also post the rankings of the Big Ten conference teams. Here are the rankings right now. They differ from the rankings on the site because I made a small change to how I score games in overtime–I now count those as having been decided by a single point to capture the closeness of the games. Here are where the B1G teams end up in the overall rankings:

5 Michigan St
11 Indiana
14 Purdue
19 Maryland
21 Iowa
32 Wisconsin
39 Michigan
52 Ohio St
63 Northwestern
90 Nebraska
93 Illinois
102 Penn St
167 Minnesota
210 Rutgers

These rankings reflect all games across the season without discounting games earlier in the season.

The committee will look at how the teams did down the stretch, and I wanted to get a sense for how I would rank teams based on only the conference games played in the second half of the season. This doesn’t discount the games and it completely ignores the early, non-conference schedule, but it gives a sense as to how the teams should be ranked based on the quality of the wins and losses in the conference schedule.

The results are below using my Modified Logistic Regression Markov Chain method. I only rank the 14 B1G teams because I am only considering B1G games. My B1G rankings are really close to the official ranking based on the standings (in parentheses). I am able to rank order the four teams tied for third place.

Ranking just B1G conference games (official ranking based on the standings in parentheses):

1. Indiana (1)
2. Michigan St (2)
3. Iowa (3)
4. Maryland (3)
5. Wisconsin (3)
6. Purdue (3)
7. Michigan (8)
8. Ohio St (7)
9. Northwestern (9)
10. Nebraska (11)
11. Penn St (10)
12. Illinois (12)
13. Minnesota (13)
14. Rutgers (14)

We can see a few differences between the win/loss (standings) rankings and my rankings. While Michigan State is the top ranked team in the B1G when considering all games, Michigan State finished second when considering just the conference games. Wisconsin, for example, played poorly earlier in the season and finished 5th when considering only conference games.

I’ll post my final B1G conference rankings after the B1G conference tournament.

Check out Badger Bracketology for more updates.