Earlier this week, Dave Sez broke out the log5 predictions for the ACC, the latest fad in basketball number crunching. This in turn prompted Chad Orzel to complain about the overstatisticification of basketball blogging. I'm not particularly interested in log5 type analysis myself, but I am interested in things that give the Tar Heels better than 50-50 odds to win the ACC championship. That seemed high to me even at the time, not considering the subsequent loss to Georgia Tech. But the numbers had been crunched assuming UNC would be the top seed - far from a sure thing, although Clemson currently leads Virginia tech by five - so I wondered, how does the seeding effect the numbers?
So I ran an experiment. I punched the log5 formulas into an Excel spreadsheet using the same initial data Dave's reader had. I switched Duke and Maryland's position, as the Blue Devils can't finish higher than sixth, and then ran the numbers a couple of different ways.
As Dave Sez had it, but with Maryland and Duke swapped:
North Carolina (1) 0.5215 Maryland (5) 0.1046 Virginia Tech (2) 0.0458 Boston College (4) 0.0225 Virginia (3) 0.0154
North Carolina (2) 0.5082 Maryland (5) 0.1543 Virginia Tech (1) 0.0529 Boston College (3) 0.0210 Virginia (4) 0.0189
North Carolina (5) 0.4800 Maryland (4) 0.0979 Virginia Tech (2) 0.0502 Boston College (1) 0.0309 Virginia (3) 0.0171
Virginia Tech (1) 0.0556 North Carolina (3) 0.4922 Maryland (5) 0.1502 Boston College (4) 0.0358 Virginia (2) 0.0184
North Carolina (5) 0.4885 Maryland (4) 0.1019 Virginia Tech (2) 0.0493 Boston College (3) 0.0297 Virginia (1) 0.0176