Throughout the Big Ten basketball season. I have historically conducted an analysis on the results of a series simulations which provides various odds regarding the trajectory of the Michigan State men's basketball season and the Big Ten race as a whole.

In addition, I have provided additional analysis of Michigan State and the Big Ten race using Kenpom efficiency data compared to historical data and the set of statistics known as the "four factors of basketball success."

As the season goes on, the data changes almost daily. This post is meant to be a one-stop shop for the most updated data on the Big Ten race. In addition, this post will contain a explanation of how to read each table or figure. Analysis of the data will be done elsewhere. This post contains "just the facts."

Last Update: Jan. 16, 2025

Percentage of Big Ten games completed: 55 of 180 games (31%)

Table 1 below is what I refer to as the enhanced Big Ten standings. It includes the current Big Ten record of each team in addition to four other pieces of data.

First, it contains the current Kenpom rankings and adjusted efficiency margins (AdjEM) for each team. Second, it contains the "plus/minus" for each team. The value is equal to the number of road wins minus the number of homes losses.

Third, Table 1 lists the current "luck" for each Big Ten team. I define luck as the difference between the actual number of wins and the expected number of wins so far, based on the retroactive spreads derived from the Kenpom adjusted efficiencies of each team. Finally, the table contains the overall strength of schedule advantage/disadvantage relative to the conference average.

Table 2 shows the odds that each Big Ten team will finish with any number of total conference wins, from zero to 20. This is based on a 1,000,000 cycle Monte Carlo simulation of the full Big Ten regular season where the current Kenpom efficiency margin for each team (also shown in Table 2) is used to project point spreads for all conference games.

The simulation also uniquely takes into account the historical uncertainty in each teams' efficiency margin based on the time remaining before Selection Sunday. The total number of expected wins are calculated based on the matrix. The values shown in parentheses are the change in each value since the last major update on Jan. 6.

Figure 1 below is a histogram showing the win probability distribution for Michigan State based on the data in Table 2.