Top 4 #HLMBB seeds with 8 games to go

I'll just repeat the disclaimer I wrote here: Top 2 seed scenarios with 10 games left in #HLMBB.

This year my tiebreaker analysis is going to be less than 100% definite because I have not heard yet exactly how the Horizon League office is treating Milwaukee in it's application of the tiebreakers. Obviously they are ineligible for the NCAA tournament, therefore they are ineligible for the Horizon League tournament.

I'm going to go out on a limb and base my analysis on the following premise: all of Milwaukee's league games count for the teams they played, therefore the proper thing to do is pretend that Milwaukee is eligible and then at the very end delete them from the list and move everybody lower up one slot.

As of yesterday's games:

Oakland 81 UIC 56
Milwaukee 66 Cleveland State 60

Team      W  L Pct.  GB
Valpo    12  2 0.857 0
CSU      11  4 0.733 1.5
GB       10  4 0.714 2
Oakland  10  4 0.714 2
Milw.     7  7 0.500 5
Detroit   6  9 0.400 6.5
UIC       3 11 0.214 9
WSU       3 11 0.214 9
YSU       2 12 0.143 10

The conference is perfectly split in half. We know that Detroit, UIC, Wright State, and Youngstown State will be playing first round games on Tuesday March 4th, and Valpo, CSU, Green Bay, and Oakland will be waiting for them on Friday.

Thanks to Milwaukee's take down of CSU, Valpo is now the only team in control of their own destiny, though if they lose at Detroit, CSU will regain control over their destiny. But Valpo still gets the 1 seed if they beat CSU. However, they can clinch the 1 seed on Wednesday at Calihan Hall.

Even if they lose both games, they still get the 2 seed if Oakland loses at least one of their remaining games. In a 3-way tie between CSU, Valpo, and Green Bay, CSU wins the tiebreaker (3-1) and Green Bay loses it (1-3), while Valpo sits in the middle (2-2). Replace Green Bay with Oakland and Valpo loses the tiebreaker based on Green Bay as the common opponent, where Valpo is the only team to lose to the Phoenix.

CSU gets the 1 seed if they beat Valpo and Detroit beats Valpo and Oakland loses at least one more game. Green Bay is no threat to CSU because of the head-to-head tiebreaker. If Oakland ties at 12-4, as mentioned above, Valpo drops out first, and there is no common opponent that breaks the remaining tie between Oakland and CSU, so we have to resort to the RPI tiebreaker. rpiforecast.com currently projects CSU as the winner, but I have no idea how sure of a thing that is. I choose to not project but simply leave it hanging.

If CSU beats Valpo and Valpo beats Detroit, CSU gets the 2 seed unless Oakland wins out and wins the RPI tiebreaker. If CSU loses to Valpo, they can still get the 2 seed if Green Bay beats Oakland but loses to UIC. In a 3-way tie at 11-5, CSU is 3-1, Oakland 2-2, and Green Bay 1-3. They also win a 2-way tie with Green Bay as mentioned above.

If CSU loses to Valpo, Green Bay wins out, and Oakland beats YSU, CSU ends up with the 4 seed because they lose the 3rd place tiebreaker with Oakland based on Valpo as a common opponent.

In all the remaining scenarios, CSU gets the 3 seed.

If Green Bay wins out and Valpo beats CSU, Green Bay gets the 2 seed, since CSU and Oakland finish 11-5 or worse.

If Green Bay beats Oakland on Saturday and at least matches their win total during the week, they avoid the 4 seed by winning more games than Oakland. Any Green Bay tie with Oakland breaks in favor of Oakland because of common opponent Cleveland State, if not a head-to-head sweep by Oakland. Therefore, if Green Bay finishes tied with or below Oakland, they end up with the 4 seed (they can only tie at 11-5, and at that record they lose tiebreakers with both CSU and Oakland; if they lose out they must be alone at 10-6).

Detroit and Milwaukee are on an island by themselves. Neither can even tie for 4th, and neither can fall into a tie for 7th. If Detroit beats Valpo and Milwaukee loses out, they tie for 5th place. This accounts for 32 of the 256 possible scenarios. In all but 4 of these scenarios, the tie can be broken simply by virtue of Milwaukee's ineligibility. The remaining 4 scenarios leave the tie in limbo until the tie between CSU and Oakland for first place is resolved using RPI.

In the remaining 224 scenarios, Milwaukee finishes ahead of Detroit. In all 256 scenarios, Detroit ends up with the 5 seed since Milwaukee is ineligible. So we can say unofficially that Detroit will be the 5 seed and host the 8 seed at Calihan Hall on Tuesday March 3rd.

The remaining seeds I will tackle in my next post.