NERD ALERT: 2021 Coastal Division Statistical Analysis

Not sure how many of y'all remember as it's been a few years, but it's about that time of year when I put together my massive Coastal Division spreadsheet. Heading into tonight's game, there are 14 conference games remaining featuring at least one Coastal Division team, leading to a total of 16,384 possible permutations of the season from this point on. My spreadsheet looks at every one of these permutations and calculates a champion for each one as well as the relative probability of that permutation and spits out totals for each team.

It's no surprise that the Hokies have struggled a bit so far this year, and (spoiler alert) the numbers follow that same narrative. In the table below, the middle column shows how many of those 16,384 permutations each contender would win. The rightmost column shows the relative probability of each contender winning (using the SP+ rankings), which doesn't match the middle column for the sole reason that not every permutation is created equally (for example, 1,024 of them involve Duke winning out). You'll note that VT has much lower odds than the raw numbers would indicate, and that is mostly due to the fact that VT has the lowest SP+ rating of all 5 remaining contenders plus plays 3 of the last 4 weeks on the road.

That "Tie" line above is the same as in prior iterations of this report. Those are all 3-way ties that cannot be resolved until Step #7 in the ACC Football Tiebreaker Policy: "The tied team with the higher ranking by the Team Rating Score metric provided by SportSource Analytics following the conclusion of regular season games." Since there's no way to know who would be ranked first by "SportSource Analytics" unless and until it happens, I just have them listed under "Tie".

Something new from 2019 is that "Unknown" line. At one point recently, one individual pointed out that they interpreted Step #3 in the tiebreakers differently than I did. We had a back-and-forth discussion for a bit, and while they made a good point, I (a) didn't like their attitude, and (b) still think that my original interpretation has merit. So, in the couple years that have passed since then, I have reached out to a number of different people who might have connections to someone who could authoritatively state how that step would be applied, but none of them have responded with anything definitive, so I have decided that any outcome that changes based on the interpretation of that rule should be marked as "Unknown", and if/when it gets closer to being relevant we might get a more definitive answer.

Anyway, here are some charts:

I don't know about y'all, but I'm looking forward to watching those blue wedges shrink over the next few weeks.