Two weeks ago, I presented my two-part preview of the Big Ten men's basketball season, including a ton of data about how the season is likely to play out. In just this short period of time, already a lot has changed.

Most importantly, the Michigan State Spartans traveled to Columbus last Friday and earned a hard-fought win over the Ohio State Buckeyes, 69-62. MSU is now 3-0 in conference play, 12-2 overall on the 2024-2025 season, and in the midst of a seven-game win streak. Michigan State is tied at the top of the Big Ten with the Michigan Wolverines.

Since Christmas, a lot of the data related to the conference race has shifted. For today's update, let us focus on the updated odds to win or share the Big Ten regular season title as shown below in Table 1.

The Spartans have moved up six-and-a-half percentage points and one spot on the leaderboard since Christmas Eve. My calculations now give Michigan State a 24.4% chance to win or share the Big Ten Title.

These odds are less than 10 percentage points behind the new Big Ten leaders, Illinois, with 33.1% odds. The Fighting Illini just returned from a very successful trip to the West Coast, which included a win at Washington and an eyebrow-raising, 32-point win over Oregon in Eugene.

This win gave a huge boost to the Fighting Illini's Kenpom Efficiency Margin (+3.84) and also boosted the conference odds by 22 percentage points. Michigan's Big Ten odds also surged by nine percentage points to 31.1%, thanks to a win at USC on Saturday night and a Kenpom-padding blowout win over Western Kentucky earlier in the week.

Purdue (15.4%) currently sits in fourth place on the leaderboard following two fairly easy wins at Minnesota and versus Northwestern.

While the Fighting Illini, Wolverines, Spartans and Boilermakers all saw their fortunes improve over the past two weeks. A few other teams were not so lucky. Oregon's loss to Illinois dropped the Ducks to sixth place (4.1% odds) on the Big Ten leaderboard.

UCLA (13.5%) dropped 11 percentage points to fall into fifth place after a loss at Nebraska. But the biggest losers this week were the Maryland Terrapins (2.1%). Maryland looked like a bonafide contender two weeks ago, but back-to-back losses at Washington and at Oregon have dropped the Terrapins to just 1-3 in conference play. The odds suggest that this hole is too large to dig out of.

Michigan State is now expected to win 13.51 conference games, which is just behind Illinois (14.14) and Michigan (13.96), but ahead of Purdue (12.92) and UCLA (12.70).

The Spartans are projected to be favored in all but four of the remaining regular season games. In the scenario where all the projected favorites win out, Illinois would win the conference with a 17-3 record.

Michigan, Michigan State and UCLA would tie for second at 16-4 and the Spartans would claim the No. 4 seed in the Big Ten Tournament behind No. 2 UCLA and No. 3 Michigan.

In my analysis of the Michigan State and Big Ten basketball season so far this year, including the section above, I have focused primarily on the Big Ten race. The main input into my simulation and analysis is a the set of possession-by-possession offensive and defensive efficiency that is compiled by Ken Pomeroy.

Efficiency data can be used for a lot more than just the Big Ten race. Today, I would like to reintroduce one of my favorite college basketball visuals that provides valuable perspective on where the current Michigan State team is located and where they might be headed.

Figure 1 below is what I refer to as the Kenpom efficiency scatter plot which includes data through Jan. 5.