Checked out the New PWR Details post and can’t make heads or tails of it?
No worries, for those who don’t want to dig into the numbers themselves, but just want to know what’s going to happen — I’ve got the PWR forecaster back up and running. A brief explanation of the technology is at the end of the article.
This is actually a very fun week to first post it, in that the Sioux don’t play. So, you’re getting to see the pure effects of other teams’ games on UND’s PairWise ranking.
Games to watch
Northern Michigan over Ferris St (sweep helps UND about 1.3, single win not much at all)
Alaska over Michigan St (sweep helps UND about 1.2, single win not much)
Wisconsin over Michigan (single win helps UND about 1.2)
Denver/CC over Mercyhurst/Air Force (UND is an average of 1.4 higher if Mercyhurst is swept, 1.5 higher if Air Force is swept, 2.1 lower if Denver is swept, .4 lower if CC is swept)
Looking at UND’s PWR details, a few of these are obvious. UND can take the comparison to Ferris by flipping RPI (even though TUC is about to come into play and currently favors Ferris). Similar story for Michigan St. UND already has the RPI comparison for Michigan so TUC or COP must be up for grabs.
CC/Denver are interesting and less immediately obvious — UND’s 0-7 deficit vs. Denver is insurmountable, so this one isn’t about the direct comparison between UND and Denver. So, there’s some secondary effect there (which interestingly correlates with the common theory of the importance of interconference records. :shrug: )
Brief explanation of the simulator
The PWR forecaster simulates the remainder of the season millions of times, with random outcomes for each game (the probability of each team winning a given game isn’t 50-50, but instead determined by their relative strength as measured by KRACH).
For each set of outcomes, the PairWise Ranking is recalculated and tallied. Those tallies are then used to determine probabilities for particular outcomes, e.g. in 1/5 of outcomes UND is ranked #10 in PWR and in 1/2 of outcomes UND is ranked #11 in PWR, and so forth.