December 29 Update

Now in:
Dayton
Ohio State
Kansas State
Syracuse

Now out:
South Florida
Tulane
North Carolina State
Illinois

Conferences with multiple bids:
Big Ten: 8
SEC: 8
ACC: 7
PAC 12: 7
Big 12: 4
Atlantic 10: 2
Big East: 2
Atlantic Sun: 2

December 22 Update: Rise of the Horns

The Longhorns got an early Christmas present this weekend (or if you prefer, an on-time Hanukkah present): respect from ESPN college women's hoops bracketologist Charlie Creme. He tweeted his love on Sunday after the Longhorns rallied to beat Texas A&M in Little Rock.

Big comeback and win by @TexasWBB to stay unbeaten. Would be a #1 seed if tournament started today.
— Charlie Creme (@CharlieCreme) December 21, 2014

The College Women's Hoops S-Factor also reflects this opinion. The S-Factor has shown Texas as a no. 1 seed since Friday, currently joined by Notre Dame, Kentucky and Louisville (and not Connecticut).

Now in:
Florida Gulf Coast

Now out:
Syracuse

Conferences with multiple bids:
Big Ten: 8
SEC: 8
ACC: 7
PAC 12: 7
Big 12: 3
American: 3
Big East: 2
Atlantic Sun: 2

NEXT UPDATE: 12/29/14

December 19 Update: The AAC Problem

The table below shows how the S-Factor stacks up against the AP poll, the Coaches poll, and RPI at this point in the season.  

Team	AP	Coaches	RPI	S-Factor
South Carolina	1	1	6	3
Connecticut	2	2	2	23
Texas	3	3	21	4
Texas A&M	4	5	19	9
Notre Dame	5	4	1	2
North Carolina	6	6	7	5
Stanford	7	7	24	16
Kentucky	8	8	3	1
Baylor	9	9	15	19
Louisville	10	10	30	11
Tennessee	11	12	28	28
Nebraska	12	15	8	7
Duke	13	13	14	27
Maryland	14	11	40	14
Georgia	15	17	50	33
Oregon State	16	14	37	12
Rutgers	17	19	73	60
Michigan State	18	21	85	66
Syracuse	19	22	43	29
Oklahoma State	20	16	171	91
Mississippi State	21	20	41	24
West Virginia	22	18	26	8
Iowa	23	24	12	18
California	24	23	12	20
Depaul	25	26	89	68
St. John's	29	25	25	37
UW Green Bay	26	33	4	30
Northwestern	27	28	22	17
Arizona State	28	40	9	6
Princeton	30		10	31
James Madison	33	27	5	39
South Florida		29	39	45
Seton Hall		30	16	35

The American Athletic Conference is really weak as a whole this year, which is why Connecticut is ranked 23rd in the S-Factor right now.  Since Louisville is no longer a part of the American, it can't really be argued that the AAC is better than conference RPI would suggest.

Connecticut's RPI will not suffer too much this year, since the Huskies will play many tough non-conference opponents this year.  But they will be saddled with a women's basketball conference roughly as challenging as the Colonial League.  It will be a huge disappointment if the Huskies don't run the table, but even that might not be enough to improve their standings in the S-Factor.   

Now in:
Oregon State
Tennessee
N.C. State

Now out:
Kansas State
Western Kentucky
Oklahoma

Conferences with multiple bids:
Big Ten: 8
SEC: 8
ACC: 8
PAC 12: 7
Big 12: 3
American: 3
Big East: 2

December 15 Update

Now in:
Long Beach State (Had a big lead against Cal and almost lost it, but "the Beach" persevered in overtime)

Oklahoma (A second half comeback against Arkansas-Little Rock came up short, yet the Sooners backed into the rankings this week due to RPI enhancement)

Now out:
UC Riverside
Colorado

Conferences with multiple bids:
Big Ten: 8
SEC: 7
ACC: 7
PAC 12: 6
Big 12: 5
American: 3
Big East: 2
Conference USA: 2 

December 12 Update

Now in:
Purdue
Kansas State
Colorado
Minnesota
Western Kentucky

Now out:
Oklahoma
Boston College
Rutgers
Kansas
Fresno State

Conferences with multiple bids:
Big Ten: 8
SEC: 7
PAC 12: 7
ACC: 7
Big 12: 4
American: 3
Big East: 2
Conference USA: 2 

December 8 Update: The First Monday Update of the Year

Today is the inaugural S-Factor run of the 2014-2015 season! And boy does it look weird!

Most of this is due to the fact that it is still so very early in the women's hoops season that RPI hasn't sorted itself out yet.  This induces a lot of error in not only the RPI part of the S-Factor's algorithm, but also in the top 50 or top 25 win factors.  Right now wins over UC Riverside, Fresno State and Cal State Bakersfield (to pick on California teams) will count towards the wins-against-top-25-opponents category.

It will be interesting to see if the S-Factor's new algorithm evolves to a higher plane of understanding about UConn as the season progresses, or if it will continue being mired in derp by ranking nineteen other teams ahead of the Huskies.

Conferences with multiple bids:
ACC: 8
SEC: 7
Big Ten: 7
PAC 12: 6
Big 12: 5
American: 3
Big East: 2
Mountain West: 2 

The New Algorithm

After an unusually poor performance for the College Women's Hoops' S-Factor last year, I decided to reevaluate the methodology that went into the rankings published here. I started off by sorting out which teams the old S-Factor predicted fairly closely to the actual seed, and which teams the S-Factor had a problem with. The chart below shows the teams where the S-Factor's prediction and the actual tournament selection differed by two seeds or more.

	Real seed	Predicted seed	Diff.
Bowling Green	not picked	9	+∞
Rutgers	not picked	11	+∞
Southern Miss	not picked	8	+∞
BYU	12	7	+5
Gonzaga	6	4	+2
Iowa	6	4	+2
MTSU	8	6	+2
Oregon State	9	7	+2
James Madison	11	9	+2
Oklahoma State	5	7	-2
LSU	7	9	-2
Georgia	8	10	-2
Vanderbilt	8	10	-2
St. Joseph's	9	11	-2
UT-Martin	13	15	-2
Texas	5	8	-3
Iowa State	7	11	-4
Oklahoma	10	not picked	- ∞
Florida State	10	not picked	-∞
Florida	11	not picked	-∞

The teams on the top half of this chart are teams that the S-Factor was too bullish on, while those on the bottom half were teams the S-Factor was too harsh on.

Generally speaking, the teams that S-Factor missed high on were teams from mid-major conferences, while the teams that the S-Factor missed low on teams from the major conferences. Eight of the eleven teams that S-Factor underpredicted by two seeds or more came from either the Big 12 or the SEC.

I realized I needed to give greater weight to the teams from elite conferences, but then the question would be what constitutes an "elite conference". Does the new American Athletic Conference count, just because it has Connecticut in it? Would I have to give the same weight to the PAC-12 that I would to the SEC? More concerning to me was the fact that any definition of an "elite conference" would be subjective, not defined by wins and losses within a single season, which would shackle teams to historic expectations rather than let them define their own destinies on the basketball court.

The answer for me until this season had been to use conference RPI as the only method to distinguish teams in competitive conferences from teams in lagging conferences. Conference record, conference tournament record, and overall record are adjusted by conference RPI such that teams in the #1-RPI conference (SEC in 2014) get the full allotment of points in these categories, while teams in the #32-RPI conference (SWAC in 2014) get no points for these categories.

But many mid major conferences have relatively decent conference RPIs. For instance, all throughout last year the old S-Factor was ranking West Coast Conference teams higher than most other bracket processes. WCC's conference RPI was just a smidge lower than the Big East's, good for eighth in the country, because the WCC had a strong middle and bottom tier compared to many other mid major conferences. But they only had one team in the top 30 in RPI (Gonzaga). A strong bottom half of the conference didn't mean anything to the selection committee, so both BYU and Gonzaga got screwed. (BYU later avenged their poor seeding by becoming only the third 12-seed in tournament history to make it to the Sweet Sixteen.)

I decided I needed another way to quantify goodness of conference.

I defined an "elite" conference as one that had a certain percentage of their teams being good teams. I played around with this idea, and I came up with an "elite conference factor" that worked reasonably well, defined by the percentage of conference teams in the top 100 RPI (25%), the top 30 (50%), and the top 10 RPI (25%). Top 30 RPI teams are almost always tournament-bound teams, and top 10 RPI teams are where superstars play, but I also wanted to include information about teams in the 30-100 range, the "challenging, but not tournament bound" range.

This "elite conference factor" ranks conferences in roughly the same order as conference RPI, but falls off much faster as one progresses from the best to the worst conferences. With the "elite conference factor", the difference between, say, the Ohio Valley Conference and the MAC is less pronounced than with conference RPI even though the MAC was 12th and the OVC was 29th last year. This better reflects the way the selection committee treats all mid-major conferences as single-bid conferences even though there is a marked difference in competition level between conferences like the MAC and conferences like the OVC.

Unlike the oblique way Conference RPI is considered in my formula, I wanted to use this "elite conference factor" directly in the S-Factor formula, as a way to put the thumb on the scales in favor of teams from major conferences. But this ran the risk of favoring obviously-not-tournament-bound teams from major conferences (Alabama, say) over legitimately strong teams from mid-major conferences (BYU, say). I decided to further restrict the "elite conference factor" to teams that could legitimately be selected to the tournament. The tournament has never selected a team with a losing record to an at-large bid. Nor have they ever selected a team with an RPI above 100 or a conference record more than 2 games below .500 (that I know of). For teams that pass these requirements, the "elite conference factor" kicks in gradually for teams above RPI of 100, until the RPI 40 team, above which the full allotment of the "elite conference factor" points is granted. (There is also a small discount for teams that are one game below .500 in conference play.)

The elite conference factor is multiplied by the correction factor and weighted to 15% of the S-Factor algorithm. This produced results that favored major conference bubble teams over mid-major bubble teams, which more closely resembles the Selection Committee's selections over the past two years (the SEC's Florida getting in, but the MAC's Bowling Green being bounced, etc.). Under the new algorithm, the S-Factor would have predicted 64 out of 64 teams in the 2014 field, and 63 out of 64 in the 2013 field. The new S-Factor algorithm would have missed on Creighton in their last year of membership in the Missouri Valley Conference, but it would have been the only bracket model to have correctly predicted the inclusion of the Big 12's Kansas, which was Charlie Creme's only miss from that year.

The new S-Factor algorithm stays true to the values it has always had: that tournament selection is based ultimately and exclusively on wins and losses, and various ways to gauge the quality of each win and loss, just like the information the Selection Committee uses when they sculpt the field of 64.