We did one of these yesterday with the NCAA Tournament. Here’s what the same simulations tell us about the NIT.
Before we dive in, a quick explanation of what we’re doing:
Since their brackets were unveiled, we’ve been simulating both the NCAA Tournament and the NIT 10,000 times per day. The ratings we use in these simulations start with KenPom, but we run the simulations “hot,” meaning if a team impresses in a certain simulated game, their rating improves for the next game in that specific simulation, and vice versa. Our aim with this is to adequately react the reality that ratings will change throughout each tournament.
Got all that? Ok. Here’s what the simulations tell us…
To make the NIT Championship:
- Xavier: 34.2%
- BYU: 29.1%
- Virginia: 28.1%
- Texas A&M: 26.8%
- Wake Forest: 24.6%
- Vanderbilt: 19.6%
- Washington State: 19.4%
- St. Bonaventure: 18.1%
To win the NIT Championship:
- BYU: 17.0%
- Wake Forest: 15.1%
- Texas A&M: 15.1%
- Xavier: 14.2%
- Washington State: 11.4%
- Virginia: 11.2%
- Vanderbilt: 8.8%
- St. Bonaventure: 7.2%
The first takeaway here is that this, even more than the pretty-open NCAA Tournament, is an open race. BYU’s hardly more than twice as likely as St. Bonaventure to win it all, and in an eight-team field, that isn’t much. The top four are hardly separated by any distance at all, and the three between Xavier and the Bonnies fill the gap pretty fluidly. Open, open field. Nothing would be very surprising, and I mean that in the real way, not in the way where you say it to hedge against a possible shocking upset as someone writing about sports.
The second takeaway here is that Wake Forest is better than A&M, which we already knew, going off of KenPom. Wake is an underdog down in College Station tomorrow but is more likely than them to win it all, reflecting their strength should they get to New York by way of a road win.
The third takeaway here is that the right side of the bracket—the side that plays tomorrow—really is so much better than the left side. Wazzu’s not that close to Xavier in championship probability, but they’re also almost just half as likely to make the championship game. We wrote in today’s bets about how the top four remaining teams in KenPom are on the right while the bottom four are on the left. This is what that looks like in probabilities.
Finally, our fourth takeaway here is that running the simulations hot doesn’t make too much of an impact on this bracket. This is mostly because each individual quarterfinal and semifinal figures to be pretty close. There isn’t the phenomenon happening where if one team wins, they’ll necessarily have overperformed. Barring quite the blowout, the spreads are all going to be close, until possibly the championship game.
That’s what we’re working with, entering tonight.
