Just Give the SEC to Texas A&M

By William Ezekowitz

Note: An earlier version of this article was published on rushthecourt

This year the SEC was supposed to belong to Kentucky. The Cats entered the season with a new crop of highly touted freshmen, and Ben Simmons’ LSU and an improved Vanderbilt team were the only other schools even in the preseason top 25 that could challenge 2nd ranked Kentucky. Thus far, those predictions have proven wrong. South Carolina had its moment as the SEC’s top team, but the one team that has separated itself from the competition is Texas A&M. In fact, though the season is halfway over, it may already be safe to declare the Aggies the conference champions thanks to their dominance thus far and the easiness of their remaining schedule.

Kenpom, your one stop shop for your college basketball statistical needs, provides a helpful conference SOS ranking for each team, but this statistic isn’t particularly useful to us at present because it only counts games that have been played. But in gauging the difficulty of remaining schedules, we need not stray from Kenpom. Starting this year, Pomeroy has given a game an “A” rating if it is equivalent to playing a top 50 team on a neutral court, and a “B” rating for top 100. As Pomeroy himself explains, these ratings account for home court advantage, which has large effects on how hard a game is to win. So how do the favorites of the SEC stack up?

Team Current Record A Games Left B Games Left Easy Games
Texas A&M

7-0

5

2

4

Kentucky

5-2

5

1

5

Florida

5-2

6

1

4

South Carolina

4-2

4

2

6

Note: LSU, though they have just two losses and Ben Simmons, are ranked 60th in Kenpom, so we won’t consider them a contender. Don’t blame us, blame Johnny Jones.

The disparity in schedules comes from the SEC having 14 teams and 18 conference games, so each team must play five teams twice. Which five teams you play twice, as one might imagine, is incredibly important. Kentucky drew the short end of the stick this year: in Florida, Vanderbilt, LSU and Tennessee, they must play four of the seven SEC teams currently in the Kenpom top 60 (and their last team, Alabama, isn’t a cupcake either). Florida, meanwhile, must contend with Kentucky, Vanderbilt and LSU.

The big winners here are South Carolina and Texas A&M. The Gamecocks somehow don’t play a single team in the top half of the SEC twice. But don’t get too excited about them, as they have lost the only two A games they have played in conference thus far.

The Aggies avoid the other three favorites, albeit having to contend with some other decent teams (Vanderbilt, Arkansas, and LSU plus easy wins in Missouri and Mississippi State). Perhaps the most important aspect of the entire schedule, however, is that Texas A&M plays Florida, Kentucky and South Carolina at home. The hardest road games they play are at Arkansas and at LSU whom they beat by 23 and 14 respectively at home.

Put it all together, and the picture looks bleak for the contenders. Texas A&M will be favored in all of their remaining conference games, and it’s hard to see them losing more than two. Moreover, remaining schedules being what they are, it’s hard to imagine anyone else winning enough to match them. Even if Kentucky beats the Aggies on the road, they still have to play Florida twice and go to South Carolina and Vanderbilt.

The numbers that we have tell a similar tale. Using Kenpom’s percentage likelihood of victory for each game, we can run a Monte Carlo simulation for the season. In basic terms, the Monte Carlo simulation, will simulate the remainder of the season an infinite amount of times and give us a percentage of the team that each team will win the conference. Here are the results:

Team % Chance of Winning SEC
Texas A&M

89.40%

Kentucky

6.30%

Florida

1.80%

South Carolina

1.50%

These predictions are at the end because they shouldn’t be taken as the gospel. They are based on Kenpom’s ratings, which, while incredibly informative, are by no means perfect in their predictive power. That being said, the numbers provide a powerful illustration of the current SEC basketball landscape. Dare to dream, Aggie fans. This is your year.

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