WhatIfSports: Can Memphis stay perfect?
by WhatIfSports.com, Special to FOXSports.com
This year, Memphis is still in the running; but, even if the Tigers were a 95 percent favorite — meaning they would win all but one out of every 20 matchups with the team — in every game, they would only have a 17.5 percent chance of getting through the 39 games necessary to win a championship without a loss. Very rarely is any team a 95 percent favorite in any game, even with a team like Memphis that plays in a conference that is not nearly as strong as some other elite teams' conferences.
That being said, John Calipari's Memphis squad has used depth, versatility and a perfect blend of young athleticism and skillful experience to win its first 26 games of the season. So what are the chances that they keep up that streak for the rest of the regular season? Through the C-USA tournament? And, all the way to the end of the season? The answers to those questions are decent (44.19 percent), fairly unlikely (26.16) and highly unlikely (5.23).
To conduct this analysis, we at WhatIfSports.com utilized our free SimMatchup technology to simulate Memphis' remaining regular-season games 1,000 times each. We then determined the most likely C-USA tournament games to plot that path and simulate those games in the same manner. And finally, for the NCAA tournament we reviewed the pre-tournament likelihoods of strong top-seeds from 10,000 simulations of each bracket in previous years to find Memphis' expected chance at a championship. This allowed us to put an exact value on Memphis' chance of being undefeated at any given point of the season from today forward. All simulations utilize strength-of-schedule adjusted statistics that also consider home-court advantage.
At 44.19 percent, Memphis has close to an even chance of making it through the regular season undefeated. Obviously, the biggest game remaining takes place this Saturday when it hosts No. 2 Tennessee. The Vols are not the second-strongest team in the nation according to the numbers, yet they should pose a challenge and at least keep the game entertaining. With great depth, ability to push the pace, efficient field goal shooting and even with their poor free-throw shooting, these teams are actually eerily similar. Memphis has a pretty clear edge in rebounding, shot blocking and keeping other teams off of the free throw line. In the sim, those traits and the home-court advantage led to Memphis wins 63.14 percent of the time by an average score of 86-81.
After Saturday, the rest of the regular season looks relatively easy. As of the current numbers, Memphis would be a 97.31 percent favorite against Tulsa at home, an 89.30 percent and 93.65 percent favorite at Southern Miss and SMU, respectively, and an 86.01 percent favorite when it hosts UAB in the finale. Clearly, the Tennessee outcome will play a bigger factor in this discussion than any other game before the NCAA tournament. Assuming Memphis gets past Tennessee on Saturday, the Tigers will have a 69.99 percent chance of winning the final four games.
With the C-USA tournament, Memphis, the defending champion, has a 59.2 percent chance of repeating. On a neutral floor against a team like Houston or UAB, Memphis should be about a 76.55 percent favorite to win the final. After Tennessee, this would be the next likeliest game for the Tigers to lose. Given that chance of winning the conference tournament, Memphis has a 26.16 percent (roughly one-in-four) chance of being undefeated going into the NCAA tournament in mid-March. If we assume that they get by Tennessee this weekend, that percentage goes up to 41.43 percent.
And finally, simulating the NCAA tournament from this point on is trivial. Instead of guessing at the 65 teams, seedings and matchups, we studied our annual Bracket Preview to find the expected likelihood of one of the strongest No. 1 seeds winning it all. Even the best team in the country only wins the NCAA tournament about 20 percent of the time, or one out of every five times we simulate the bracket (some would say that is what makes March Madness so entertaining). Games get progressively more difficult with those likelihoods of the best team advancing being about 90 percent for the Sweet 16, 80 percent for the Elite 8, 65 percent for the Final Four and 40 percent for the championship game. Using the 20 percent figure for the championship, Memphis would have a 5.23 percent chance of winning all of the 14 games (8.29 percent chance of winning 13 straight if it beats Tennessee) that it would take to join the 1975-76 Indiana Hoosiers at the pinnacle of college basketball history.
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