Big Ten Men's Tournament

With the NCAA tournament coming up I figured it was important to make a more sophisticated bracket than just picking the highest ranked team in each round. So, on the flight over to the SSAC, I created a bracket predictor. This is the sort of thing that's supposed to let me know that even though Kansas (ranked #2 last year) is better than UNI (#9), there's a surprising likelihood of an upset there, and maybe I shouldn't pick Kansas to win it all (the rankings didn't, they had Duke. I on the other hand...). Without further ado, here are some early results of the bracket predictor as shown on the Big Ten tournament (with a few others in the other posts). The number listed under a round is the likelihood a team wins that round. Iowa for example has a 34.4% chance of winning in the first round, but just a 7.7% chance of winning in both the first and second rounds.

TEAM	Rd 1	Rd 2	Rd 3	Rd 4
Ohio St	1	0.818	0.606	0.406
Purdue	1	0.727	0.428	0.206
Wisconsin	1	0.728	0.387	0.177
Illinois	1	0.613	0.219	0.101
Michigan	1	0.387	0.103	0.037
Michigan St	0.656	0.206	0.083	0.026
Minnesota	0.542	0.105	0.043	0.014
Penn St	0.55	0.16	0.052	0.014
Northwestern	0.458	0.077	0.029	0.009
Indiana	0.45	0.113	0.032	0.007
Iowa	0.344	0.067	0.018	0.004

Ohio St, the top ranked overall team, is the clear favorite to take the title here, but there are other clear options. Both Purdue and Wisconsin make sense, but Illinois might also sneak up on some people. As for the Hawkeyes, unless Jared Reiner gets another year of eligibility all of sudden we might have to wait until next year for a full turn around.