Monday, November 24, 2014

acc season sim

I'm going out of town for Thanksgiving, which means a pretty long holiday hiatus, which means if I'm gonna finish a preview of the VT game it's gotta be done tonight, which means if any other content is getting posted tonight it's gotta be short and sweet.  So I figured I'd whip up an old favorite a little early: the ACC season predictor.

This is one of my better spreadsheets, if I do say so myself: I can punch in the KenPom-given probabilities for each game and simulate 10,000 ACC seasons in seconds flat.  The only thing it can't do is the proper tiebreakers; instead, I just tiebreak using the KenPom rankings.  But otherwise it's pretty neato, it spits out each team's chance of landing in a particular seed in the ACC tournament.  Presented without a hell of a lot of comment is this season's first go-round:


I think the main conclusions for now are that there are three main contenders (Duke, Louisville, UVA) and three outside contenders, of which surprisingly Miami is one and Pitt is not.  And that the race for 9th could get very interesting.  9th is a good place to be because you get a bye straight to the 8th team; 10th is not bad either because playing VT is sort of like a bye too.  Drop to 11th, though, and not only does the quality of your opening-round opponent go way up, so does the quality of your next-round opponent.  Naturally, the end result in March won't look much like this, but it's fun to know where things stand anyway.

So, just as a programming note, don't expect anything between now and next week, except for one thing: the VT game preview, which I'll automate to run on Wednesday morning.  Have a very excellent Thanksgiving, and hopefully, an even better Friday night.  If things go well I get to come back and excitedly overanalyze the shit out of East Carolina or Illinois.  If things go even better I'll even get to watch from a Ford Field seat.


Here's the third iteration of the sim:


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