BIG 12 OUTLOOK: 01.16.12

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Ironically enough, despite the playing of five separate Big 12 games, the conference standings remained unchanged after Saturday's action.

What does it all mean? Well, Baylor and Kansas are pulling away from the pack heading into their Big Monday showdown tonight, with Missouri hot on their heels.

And at three games out of first place, the Cats probably should just forget about competing for a conference championship for the rest of the month until they at least, oh, I don't know, get back to .500.

K-State now is forced to battle it out in Mediocrity Land with the likes of Texas, Oklahoma State, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Iowa State and Texas A&M.

Luckily, guess who our next six games are against? Win five or six of those and then we'll start talking title again.

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

Looks as if Baylor finally has done enough to pick up a few more predicted wins and surpass Missouri in the seed prediction matrix.

Other than that, just a few one-game adjustments were made in the predicted win-loss records.

You might think K-State's loss would have been far more damaging, but OUTLOOK takes a long view of events and doesn't react dramatically to one-game deviations from predictions.

GAMER: Now has Baylor winning at Kansas and Missouri, Kansas State winning at Texas A&M, and Missouri losing at Kansas.

Pomeroy: Now has Baylor winning at Texas, Iowa State winning at Oklahoma State and Kansas losing at Baylor.

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

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Self-Evaluation

Five misses, and three of them are due to the Cats. I'd have a freakin' 85-percent accuracy rate if I just flipped the predicted result for every single K-State game, even though that would have had us winning at KU.

The mercurial unpredictability of Team Turmoil aside, the pattern that's quickly emerging is that home court rules as strongly as always. All five home teams held sway on Saturday. Road teams only won six of the 20 games.

That pattern should hold this week. All five teams are predicted to win and almost unanimously, with only GAMER inexplicably and suddenly deciding that it likes Baylor to win tonight, despite usually favoring home teams.

Cumulative pick record: 15-5 (.750)

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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