When we last looked at the Ivy League Harvard was rolling the Crimson were ranked in the Top 25 and everyone’s darling. Since then Harvard has gone 2-1 with a loss to Fordham. (Yes, Fordham.) Conference play starts for real on Saturday as the Crimson host Dartmouth and start their attempt for a perfect Ivy season, but now it doesn’t seem like quite as much as a sure thing.
I re-simmed those 10,000 seasons and a funny thing happened on the way to crowning Tommy Amaker’s club, some other teams started winning. Last time I went through this exercise Harvard won the title outright in 87.6% of the simulations and at least shared the title in 95.1%. That’s dropped to 77.8% and 89.5%. The Crimson went undefeated just 840 times in the new simulation.
It’s also worth noting that things have gotten worse for Brown. The Bears lost two more games, to American and St. Francis (NY), since the last time the sim was run and now it’s as likely that someone will go winless as it is Harvard will go undefeated. Brown failed to win a game in 635 sims and Dartmouth did the same in 123 seasons.
The other thing worth noting about Harvard’s fall? There’s a chance, even if it’s very unlikely, that another team might go undefeated. Princeton, Yale and Columbia (yeah, I know…) all went undefeated at least once. Also, with Harvard’s dominance slipping a bit there were more ties. 1,258 of the seasons ended in a tie, up from 792 in the first sim. Most (1,075) were two-team ties, but there were a few four-team and five-team ties. Unfortunately there was no six-team madness.
I’ve also started tracking the average number of wins for a team. It’s included in the chart for your amusement. It appears that things break down into Harvard – Princeton, Yale – Penn – Columbia, Cornell – Dartmouth, Brown right now. Where the Quakers end up could make a big difference in this Ivy League season.
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Can’t wait to actually see some real Ivy League games soon!
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