2025 ARTICLE 9: 2025 PRE-SEASON PREDICTIONS AND INFORMATION, PART 3, "PREDICTED" CONFERENCE REGULAR SEASON AND TOURNAMENT CHAMPIONS

Continuing with "predictions," using the "results likelihood" method described in 2025 Article 9, my system uses the same "3 points for a win and 1 for a tie" scoring that conferences use for their standings to create team standings within each conference.  It is worth noting that the results likelihoods take game locations into account and that a good number of conferences do not play full round robins.

Using the ACC as an example, here are what its "predicted" end-of-season standings look like:

Although Florida State's and North Carolina's points look the same, that is due to rounding.  Florida State's are slightly higher.  My interpretation of these standings is that it will be very close at the top of the conference among Florida State, North Carolinam Stanford, and Duke, with Virginia also in the mix.

Using the conference standings and the conference tournament formats (as published to date), my system next creates conference tournament brackets.  Then, since it is necessary to have winners and losers to fill out the entire tournament brackets, the system assigns as a game winner any team that has a win likelihood above 50%.  Where neither team has a win likelihood above 50%, the system treats the game as a tie.  For the tiebreaker, the advancing team is the one with the higher win likelihood.

This process results in the following conference regular season and conference tournament champions.  In most cases they are the same, but in two cases they are different.