SEC Is Texas A&M’s To Lose
Posted by William Ezekowitz on January 19th, 2016As it often is, the SEC was supposed to belong to Kentucky this year. But now, five games into the conference season, should we already be penciling in current conference leader Texas A&M as the SEC’s presumptive champion, given the Wildcats’ struggles? Perhaps we should. The SEC schedule is kinder to Texas A&M than it is to any other contending team down the stretch, so the Aggies are poised to extend their advantage in the standings as the season progresses. KenPom provides a helpful conference SOS statistic, but that only covers games a team has played, which makes it only moderately valuable five games into the conference season. However, in order to gauge the difficulty of remaining schedules, we can still use KenPom’s game difficulty ratings. Starting this year, Pomeroy has given a game an “A” rating if it is equivalent to playing a top 50 team on a neutral court, and a “B” rating for top 100. As Pomeroy himself explains, these ratings account for home court advantage, which has large effects on how hard a game is to win.
So how do the teams with even somewhat realistic chances to win the SEC stack up in terms of difficulty of remaining games? Here it is:
The disparity is so large because the SEC has 14 teams but 18 conference games, so each team must play five other teams twice. This is where South Carolina and Texas A&M receive a clear advantage. The Gamecocks don’t play a single team in the top half of the conference twice; Texas A&M, meanwhile, must play Vanderbilt, LSU and Arkansas plus cellar-dwelling Mississippi State and Missouri, which is slightly harder. Compare that to Kentucky, though, who gets Florida, Vanderbilt, LSU, Tennessee and Alabama. None of these are cupcake games – especially on the road – and for a team that just lost at Auburn.
So while Kentucky’s chances look bleak, South Carolina still appears to be a legitimate contender for the Aggies to fight off, although Texas A&M does get home court advantage for the one game between the two teams. In fact, the Aggies play every other KenPom top 50 team in the SEC (Arkansas, Florida, South Carolina, Vanderbilt, Kentucky) at home and not once on the road. A&M’s hardest road game comes against LSU, a team KenPom rates 61st in the country and projects to go 10-8. Given their dominant performance through the first five games, it’s tough to imagine the Aggies losing many remaining games. Pair that assumption with the head-scratching losses many rivals have recently suffered, and it’s tough to imagine any other team taking the Aggies to the wire by winning 14 or 15 league games.
But we can do better than abstract prognostication—we have numbers! Using KenPom’s percentage likelihood of victory for each game, we can run a Monte Carlo simulation for the season. In basic terms, the Monte Carlo simulation, will simulate the remainder of the season an infinite amount of times and give us a percentage of the team that each team will win the conference. Here are the results:
Take these numbers with a grain of salt, though. They are based upon the KenPom ratings of each team and those of their opponents, which, while very informative, are far from an absolute evaluation of a team. For example, KenPom has Kentucky at 30th right now. They may have played like the 30th best team to this point, but their talent level should make us suspect they may be under-performing right now and that their true ranking is higher. KenPom doesn’t think that way, though. It just takes the data it has been given, with no attempt made to predict the future. But even if you disagree with KenPom’s exact rankings, the Wildcats have looked like a worse team than the Aggies. Moving forward, that disadvantage will be compounded by a harder remaining schedule, as the simulation illustrates. So while you shouldn’t necessarily think of Texas A&M as an 85.5% favorite to win the SEC, you should absolutely think of them as a heavy favorite. They look like the best team right now, they have the best record right now, and, perhaps most importantly, they have the easiest schedule from here on in. Dare to dream, Aggie fans. This should be your year.
