iogyhufi
Masters Student
Posts: 681
Age: 27
Reg: 10-10-17
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02-18-24 04:21 PM - Post#363466
With only five games left in the regular season, it's now officially an appropriate time to game out some postseason scenarios. As of now, 6 teams are still alive in the ILT race (sorry Penn and Dartmouth, you may not be mathematically dead, but any path more or less looks like "win out"). I'll game out both the race for first and the race for fourth.
As a reminder, the Ivy League has three tiebreakers:
Tiebreaker 1 - H2H record against all teams involved in the tie
Tiebreaker 2 - better record against the best team not involved in the tie. If the tied teams have identical records, this process will be repeated against successively lower-finishing teams until the tie is broken
Tiebreaker 3 - highest analytic ranking from an amalgamation of sources
Race for the 1 seed:
If Yale beats Cornell, it would win two-way ties against both Cornell (Tiebreaker 1) and Princeton (Tiebreaker 2), and it would win a 3-way tie with both (Tiebreaker 1). Beating Cornell would also give Yale a one-game lead in the race, so Yale would clinch the 1 seed by winning three of its last four games.
If Yale loses to Cornell, things get complicated. First, Yale couldn't win any tie with Cornell if Cornell were to beat Princeton in Jadwin (Tiebreaker 2) - not to mention that Cornell would have a game clear on Yale if it did - so Yale pretty much would need Princeton to beat Cornell. But Yale also can't win a 2-loss tie involving Princeton in this scenario (Tiebreaker 3), so Yale would also need the Tigers to lose to someone other than Cornell. If both of those things happen, Yale would still control its own destiny vs Cornell (Tiebreaker 3, unless Yale loses by a truckload in Ithaca). Yale could theoretically win a multi-way three-loss tie, but there are too many possibilities there to make it practical to game them out right now.
Cornell pretty much needs to beat Yale on Friday to get the 1-seed. If it does so, it can sew up tiebreakers against both Yale (Tiebreaker 2) and Princeton (Tiebreaker 1) by beating Princeton in Jadwin, which would mean Cornell could lose one of its remaining three games and still clinch the 1-seed.
If Cornell beats Yale but loses to Princeton, Cornell would lose any 2-loss tie with the Tigers (Tiebreaker 3) or Bulldogs (Tiebreaker 3), so they would need Princeton and Yale to each lose another game.
Princeton needs Cornell to beat Yale, and to win out, basically. If that happens, they get the 1-seed. Losing a game to somebody other than Cornell hurts more because it gives Princeton a third loss than for any other reason, though it would come into play in a 3-loss tie, were one to arise.
Race for the 4-seed:
Harvard controls their own destiny for the 4-seed after clinching the tiebreaker over Columbia last night (Tiebreaker 1), so they pretty much need to equal or better Columbia's record in the last 5 games to make the ILT. (There are some Brown-related scenarios in which Harvard might not make it, but I'll cover those later.)
Columbia no longer controls its own destiny after losing to Harvard. They need to outperform Harvard by a game in order to make the ILT (subject to the same Brown caveats).
Brown actually also controls its own destiny for the ILT. If they were to beat Columbia and Harvard, Brown would be tied in the loss column with both, and Brown would win a three-way tie (Tiebreaker 1) or a two-way tie with Harvard (Tiebreaker 1) and likely Columbia, though this one will depend on other results (Tiebreaker 2). So if Brown gets those two wins, it just needs to equal or better Columbia and Harvard in the remaining three to qualify for the ILT.
Edited by iogyhufi on 02-18-24 04:24 PM. Reason for edit: No reason given.
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gokinsmen
Postdoc
Posts: 3669
Reg: 02-06-10
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ILT Scenarios
02-19-24 12:19 AM - Post#363503
In response to iogyhufi
It's very possible, verging on likely, that Princeton, Yale and Cornell finish with 12-2 records, sweeping the bottom 5 and splitting with each other. In which case it would come down to an average of NET, KenPom and BPI rankings.
If that happens, the ILT seedings would almost certainly be Princeton #1, Yale #2 and Cornell #3. Columbia playing at home would be a scary #4, but all Top 3 teams would prefer that to playing each other on Saturday. Translation: there's still a whole lot to play for.
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