Joe’s Notes: The Difference Between the SEC and the Big Ten

The Big Ten announced its new scheduling model today, and the name—Flex Protect Plus—is hilariously terrible, but the structure is good. Only eleven games are promised to be annually protected, and there isn’t a certain number of protected games per team. Iowa has three rivals—Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin—it will play annually. Penn State has zero. Schools have different cultural needs and wants, and the Big Ten handled that deftly, avoiding the industry standard in which a conference hamstrings itself through overdoing the number of matchups that must be annual.

Logistically, the way the Big Ten will handle this is through what they’re calling “two-plays,” a set of teams each school will play in 2024 and 2025 before those matchups are changed for 2026 and 2027. In 2024 and 2025, Penn State will play Michigan State, Rutgers, and USC in respective home-and-home series, with their other six opponents flipping between the remaining twelve schools. In 2026 and 2027, those three teams will be different. For as long as the structure lasts, Iowa’s three repeated opponents will always be Minnesota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.

It’s a format the league’s advertising as playoff-friendly, by which I mean they’re saying the flexibility of changing opponents every two years can help them respond to how the College Football Playoff committee is selecting teams in the 12-team system, and that while they’re not saying the flexibility of changing opponents every two years can help them respond to which of their teams are good, they mean that too. By those measures, it’s helpful. But they’re doing one other thing with this, and its national title impact is more harder to divinate.

In the current setup, which will persist for one more year, the Big Ten Championship has usually been an exercise in playing with a lit firework. Most years, the East Division champion enters the Big Ten Championship as the only team with a playoff chance and the West Division champion tries and fails to play spoiler. This exact formula has played out in five of the nine East/West years, including each of the last four. In the other four years, the league had two effective playoff quarterfinalists once (Michigan State vs. Iowa in 2015), two playoff also-rans twice (2016’s Penn State vs. Wisconsin, 2018’s Ohio State vs. Northwestern), and the East champion spoiling it for the West champion once (2017’s Ohio State vs. Wisconsin). The way it’s designed, especially these last four years, the Big Ten Championship is close to a formality, with the winner playoff-bound and the loser not in the playoff conversation anyway. Purdue wasn’t even ranked in the incoming CFP rankings this year. The West champion is generally a massive underdog, and that can be good for the East champion, whose die is usually cast by the time the championship rolls around.

In the new setup, there will be no divisions. The top two teams in the conference will play in the Big Ten Championship. This will make for a great game, especially if they do the cynical thing and make the first tiebreaker CFP ranking, but it may hurt the Big Ten’s national title chances. The bet the Big Ten is taking is that both of its top two teams will be good enough to be among the four highest-ranked conference champions should they win, and that the Big Ten will therefore lock itself into one top-four seed. The risk is a 2021 scenario in which an overachieving Group of Five school (Cincinnati, in 2021’s case) drives a wedge in ahead of the second-highest-ranked Big Ten school, and with an upset likelier in this new format, that this wedge comes back to bite the Big Ten.

This will probably still net out positively for the Big Ten. In the current setup but with the new playoff format, the doomsday scenario in which the West champion won that game would indeed be doomsday, with all Big Ten playoff teams playing one extra playoff game compared to the top four. In the new setup with the new playoff format, the downside is that the Big Ten’s more likely to not see its best regular season team get a bye because the league’s made it harder for that team to win the league’s championship. I’d say the Big Ten made the right bet, especially given the tendency of Ohio State this last decade to drop a game they shouldn’t but remain the league’s best team on paper.

Regardless of the correctness of the playoff bet, there’s another thing at play here, and it illustrates something about the Big Ten. I don’t think the priority behind the Big Ten eliminating divisions was getting its teams close to national championships. I don’t think the priority behind the protected matchups was playoff berths. I think each of those moves were made with an eye on the product itself, the quality of the games being played. The Big Ten wants more good games.

The SEC recently faced the same set of decisions as the Big Ten, and while it came to the same conclusion on whether or not to have divisions, it very publicly decided not to play nine conference games, something that would have raised the entertainment value of the league’s play in the regular season. The reason? It likely differed by school (Alabama, Auburn, Arkansas, Mississippi, Mississippi State, South Carolina, Vanderbilt, Kentucky, and Tennessee reportedly voted for eight games), but a common thread was likely present in each independent decision: For the Mississippi schools, South Carolina, Vanderbilt, Kentucky, Arkansas, and maybe Tennessee, it’s about making a bowl game. One more cupcake instead of one more SEC team on the schedule makes it a lot easier to reach six wins. For Alabama, Auburn, and maybe Tennessee, it’s about winning a national championship. One more cupcake instead of one more SEC team on the schedule helps dodge a potential bad loss and preserve player health. The upside of another win over an average SEC opponent does not outweigh the downside of losing that hypothetical game for teams trying to make the playoff or win a national championship. The SEC doesn’t care how strong its regular season product is. It’s comfortable letting Auburn play UMass, Samford, New Mexico State, and Cal in nonconference play. The SEC wants to dominate December and January. The Big Ten would rather have a more compelling product.

Is one approach smarter than the other? Is one more honorable? That’s subjective. What it really says is far more interesting.

Big Ten fans care a lot about how their teams do against the rest of the Big Ten.

SEC fans care a lot about how their teams do against the rest of the country.

Game 3

We’ve reached the dangerous point in the NBA Finals where the things we’re going to say are self-evident.

As we wrote yesterday, last night’s Nuggets win moves the needle back to where the median outcome of the series is Nuggets in 6. If we use that same framework (a 50/50 win probability in Miami, a 75/25 win probability in Denver), the Game 4 calculus is now that should the Heat win, the median result is Nuggets in 7, and should the Nuggets win, the median result is Nuggets in 5. This is kind of a funny thing about medians. Nuggets in 5 is likelier, and the path before us highlights why, but if you’re looking to minimize your expected error, the smart thing to say is Nuggets in 6.

Since I’ve already mathed out the iterations to make sure I wasn’t saying something dumb, here’s the rundown, along with what betting markets imply:

The interesting thing here is that our framework is lower on the Nuggets in the short term, but it’s very close to the market in the long term. Our little estimate doesn’t like Denver as much in Game 4 as bettors do, but over the whole series, our little estimate agrees with the market.

What’s happening? It’s possible different bettors are driving different markets. It’s possible sportsbooks are covering different liabilities in different markets, given people have been betting on the eventual champion for over twelve months and have been betting on Game 4 for less than 24 hours. It’s also possible the amount wagered on futures isn’t as high as the amount wagered on individual games, and so futures markets aren’t as efficient and/or aren’t as high a priority for books to get right. I don’t know the answer, and I could be wrong with these suggestions and our little estimate could be misjudging the magnitude of home-court advantage, but home-court advantage should be fairly settled in the market, so I’d be surprised if our FiveThirtyEight-guided estimate was that far off. Ultimately, I’d guess it’s that futures markets are inefficient and have unique driving forces because they’re open to betting over such a long period of time.

I do think, though, that there’s a conventional wisdom going around which says that if the Nuggets take Game 4, they’ll take Game 5 as well, and that if they don’t take Game 4, this will drag on to seven games. It’s a conventional wisdom that’s likely to work out—we’ve run through a lot of math here on how likely it is—but its likelihood is being overstated when money is placed where mouth is, as often happens with conventional wisdom. Also, it kind of ignores the Heat’s whole deal? The Heat haven’t been great in Miami this postseason. They’ve thrived on doing the unexpected. That doesn’t mean we should start overcompensating and saying something silly like that they’re likelier to win on the road than at home, but we should probably treat raw probability with more respect here. With the Heat more than most teams, across all sports, I don’t think you can bank on expectations subconsciously influencing results.

Great work by the Nuggets, they kept the Heat from keeping them from playing their game, that seems to be what they need. Christian Braun had a great night, but he wasn’t what won the game, and I don’t think he even pushed the needle over the edge (though I will say: Watching certain memorable college players play in the pros is a lot like watching a very tall 8^th grader walk through high school hallways—they look out of place and strangely scrawny). Nikola Jokić and Jamal Murray had great games while the Heat’s role players collectively struck out in a way that’s been unusual. Game 4 will be different, but the result may well be the same. I’d say there’s…a 50/50 chance.

The Other Game 3

It’s possible for the Panthers to lose tonight and win the Stanley Cup, but it’s unlikely enough that I think we can say that if the Knights take Game 3, the outcome of the series is certain. This is a funny thing about certainty. You have to decide where to draw the line. If your line is 100%, is it 100.0%? 100.00%? 100.0000000%? How does it depend on the thing you’re declaring certain? For me, I think we can go with 97% or whatever it would be when it comes to 3–0 leads in the Stanley Cup Finals. The consequence of being wrong is small, and we will only say such a thing a few times a decade when a series goes 3–0, so the chance of winning the numbers game is high.

The hockey goalie is a fascinating character. They’re constantly involved, yet for the most part they operate rather independently from the rest of their team. It’s like if there was a goalie in basketball as well and they never left the restricted circle. I know the role of goalie isn’t just to stop shots, but isn’t that most of the job, and the most impactful part? Goalies seem, to my uneducated eye, to be at an odd place on a hypothetical chart of how independently they operate and how much impact they have. Soccer goalies have a smaller impact. Pitchers and quarterbacks have a bigger impact and operate at the center of it all. Hockey goalies have a pretty big impact, but they operate in this isolated position not entirely unlike the final boss in a video game. Add in the reputation for streakiness and the dice-rolling air it gives the position, and the implication becomes that a lot of hockey is rolling the dice. That could explain how the sport maintains its relative unpredictability. Maybe I’m missing something big, or maybe I’m saying something obvious but new to me because I haven’t spent much time thinking about hockey in my life.

It’s Sweep Season

The Cubs are trying to avoid a sweep tonight in Anaheim, sending Drew Smyly out to the mound in a sentence that shouldn’t feel as relatively encouraging as it does. The Cubs are underdogs, but Smyly’s been solid, and it’s not like the team’s wholly impotent, even if it’s been a rough go lately.

For a little perspective, for those lamenting how much worse this team has been compared to expectations:

Entering the season, FanGraphs projected the Cubs to win 76.5 games.

Entering today, FanGraphs projected the Cubs to win 76.0 games.

Maybe the problem was the expectations.

I understand people saying they want the Cubs to be competitive every year. I think that’s fair enough, especially playing in the NL Central. But the team tried that through 2020 and it wasn’t working well. Then, Theo Epstein left, and Jed Hoyer took over, and we’re now in the equivalent of Epstein’s 2014 season with Hoyer. Remember how managed expectations were for 2015? We’re still months away from even that on the timeline, and while Hoyer didn’t inherit as broken a situation as Epstein, the degree of broken doesn’t really matter if a rebuild is in order, and a rebuild was in order. If it matters at all, it’s harder to come in like Hoyer and have to finish the teardown before beginning to build.