BIG 12 OUTLOOK: 01.09.12

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(Note: For some reason, this didn't publish at 6 p.m. as I had intended. Thus, it does not factor in Monday's Bedlam game result.)

After glancing at the standings above, one thought occurs to me regarding the upper half of the conference:

One of these things is not like the others.

That would be the red-hot Iowa St. Cyclones, fresh off a road shellacking of Texas A&M — their first conference road win in more than a year and certainly their most impressive since surprising the Cats in the OOD on Senior Day.

The now-gelling collection of transfers and misfits hasn't quite erased the stink of a loss to Drake, but it's at least calling into question whether that was the 2011 equivalent of Colorado losing to Harvard, then three-timing KSU.

Tests against Kansas and Missouri this week will tell us more about ISU's ability to be a factor, or at least a dark horse, in the conference race. But after what we saw Saturday, would an "upset" of Mizzou in Ames surprise you?

Note: As any of these numbers change, I will bold and color-code them to indicate direction of change.
Team names that are colored indicate a change in seed.
(green = upward, red = downward)

*Predicted
**According to RealTimeRPI

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Discussion

Meanwhile, there's a certain delicious irony in watching all the football factories slide to the bottom of the standings, including perennially overrated Texas, preseason favorite/flop Texas A&M and flavor-of-the-month Oklahoma.

If ever there was an argument for the Big 12 Tournament remaining in Kansas City perpetually, it's certainly advanced by the presence of the former North schools* in the top half of the chart.

(*And fellow Forlorn Five member Baylor, which doesn't really advance my argument, so ignore them, dammit.)

By the way, the tie between Baylor and Kansas State is a tie that I broke with preseason prediction, so the Cats just as easily could be destined for a No. 3 seed (or better.)

Now, time for a mea culpa. Apparently, I accidentally used last season's final Sagarin rankings instead of the current version when I did the previous installment of BIG 12 OUTLOOK.

That's why Baylor was so dissed, Texas was so high and the results were so screwy. I owe Jeff Sagarin an apology.

As you can see below, the net result of that derpage on my part is a whole bunch of switching back to the previous game predictions from a week ago. Luckily, none of the incorrect changes affected the overall game picks.

GAMER: Now has Iowa State winning at Texas Tech and Kansas State winning at Oklahoma State.

Pomeroy: Now has Oklahoma winning at Texas A&M.

Sagarin: Now has Baylor winning at Iowa State, Oklahoma State and Texas A&M; Iowa State losing at Oklahoma; Kansas losing at Missouri and winning at Texas; Kansas State losing at Baylor and winning at Texas A&M; Missouri losing at Baylor, and winning at Texas and Texas A&M; Oklahoma winning at Texas A&M; Oklahoma State losing at Oklahoma and winning at Texas A&M; Texas losing at Baylor, Kansas State and Missouri; Texas A&M losing at Oklahoma and Texas Tech; and Texas Tech losing at Oklahoma.

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Self-Evaluation

Successful picks are all about timing. Had K-State faced Missouri on Wednesday instead of Saturday, that would have gone into the record books as a hit for me.

Instead, the computers overreacted to the Lawrence implosion and fed me a second whiff — on top of the Iowa State win in College Station, which no statistical model ever was going to predict — to really salt the wound.

But like I always say, if that's the price I gotta pay to see the Cats whomp on people, I'll pay it gladly. I'm just hoping it sorts itself out soon as the systems start to figure out that certain defecting/SEC teams are pretty overrated.

From 6-12 to 2-16, it appears they're at least starting to get the message where Texas A&M is concerned.

Ironically, my incorrect Sagarin prediction was the only one to predict correctly that the Cats would win.

P.S. What's with all the losing teams scoring exactly 49 points? When did this league become so defensive and/or offensively challenged? What are we, the Big Ten?

Cumulative pick record: 7-3 (.700)

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Key

Results are plugged into this wonderful tool to generate the predicted records and seed order. Winners are predicted by a best-of-three system comprising three statistical prediction models:

• G — RealTimeRPI GAMER (an advanced statistical prediction model, claiming 76.8-percent accuracy)
• P — Ken Pomeroy's rankings (predicts a probability outcome for each game remaining)
• S — Sagarin pure points predictor rankings (home-court advantage is taken into account)

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Predicted Outcomes