Team | Record | Torvik | Miya | KenPom | PWB - Pts | Sched |
Illinois | 6-1 | 10 | 17 | 14 | 23 | 11 |
Purdue | 7-1 | 12 | 15 | 15 | 27 | 1 |
UCLA | 6-1 | 16 | 16 | 17 | 38 | 14 |
Ohio State | 5-2 | 22 | 21 | 18 | 30 | 6 |
Michigan | 6-1 | 25 | 14 | 22 | 40 | 15 |
Oregon | 8-0 | 29 | 20 | 19 | 10 | 2 |
Maryland | 7-1 | 30 | 36 | 32 | 56 | 17 |
Michigan St | 6-2 | 32 | 33 | 36 | 37 | 3 |
Wisconsin | 8-0 | 34 | 31 | 29 | 11 | 7 |
Nebraska | 6-1 | 40 | 37 | 47 | 17 | 8 |
Indiana | 5-2 | 44 | 38 | 53 | 70 | 4 |
Iowa | 6-1 | 47 | 44 | 45 | 49 | 13 |
Rutgers | 5-3 | 48 | 70 | 70 | 94 | 10 |
Penn State | 7-1 | 49 | 43 | 37 | 46 | 16 |
Northwestern | 6-2 | 52 | 62 | 64 | 72 | 9 |
Washington | 6-1 | 84 | 91 | 78 | 108 | 18 |
USC | 5-3 | 94 | 102 | 108 | 114 | 5 |
Minnesota | 6-3 | 97 | 86 | 100 | 125 | 12 |
The last column is strength of schedule relative to the Big Ten, using my ratings.
My systems don't place much weight on blowouts of inferior opponents.
Nor do they severely punish teams for not blowing out inferior opponents.
Nor do they care how good a team is supposed to be, based on last year's team or roster moves.
(In other words every season starts with all teams considered equal)
This shows up readily in the ratings differences.
Some examples...
Illinois beat Arkansas-Little Rock 92-34, a 37 point outlier. However, they lost to Alabama 100-87.
Maryland beat Canisius 108-37, a 41 point outlier. Not impressed.
You can see that Torvik and KenPom are fooled by that sort of thing.
On the flipside of that, unbeaten Oregon has an 83-81 win over #13 Alabama, a 78-68 win over #29 San Diego State and an 80-70 win over #41 Texas A&M.
The game that lowers Oregon's rating for Torvik and friends is an 80-70 win over Portland, where they were supposed to win by 40 or so.
Unbeaten Wisconsin beat #7 Pitt by 6, beat #65 UCF by 16 and #43 Arizona by 15. But they have a couple of clunkers, like the 3 point win over Texas-Rio Grande and the 21 point win over Chicago State.
UCLA has played one game against a team they weren't supposed to blow out. They lost that game to #44 New Mexico 72-64. However, their blowouts of Lehigh (85-45) and Southern Utah (88-43) have some systems thinking UCLA is a very good team. To me, they haven't given any serious evidence of that.
As the season plays out, these differences reduce and teams improve or decline, but treatment of outliers is important as it can be misleading (and hidden).
We'll see how things look at the end of December, when conference play begins in earnest.