Ken Pomeroy on the WAC (as of January 1)

Ken Pomeroy has been in his lab and emerged with his conference title predictions and league finishes. Here is his explanation:

With the calendar turning over, it’s time to forecast the regular season champs for each of the 32 conferences. As a reminder, here are the assumptions…

Using the offensive and defensive ratings through 12/31, 10,000 simulations of the rest of the season were run. I dumbed down the pythagorean exponent a bit for this exercise since there’s slightly more uncertainty in predicting things in the more distant future than with tomorrow’s games.

Listed next to each team is the number of times it won the conference in the 10,000 simulations. Divide by 100 to get the chance in percent of a team winning the regular season race. If a team is not listed, they didn’t win or tie a single simulation. Better luck next season.

I’m not exactly predicting conference champs here, but the team that would get the one-seed in their conference tournament. Thus, in the case where multiple teams tie with conference’s best record, fractional credit is given to the tied teams. This fraction is rounded in the final total. I don’t spend any time applying conference tiebreakers.

Below is his WAC rundown (I've taken the liberty to not list the numbers he refers to in his third paragraph):

WAC

Denver           
Louisiana Tech   
Utah St.        
Texas Arlington   
New Mexico St.    
Idaho             
San Jose St.      
Seattle

Texas State and Texas San Antonio do not appear (again, check the end of the third paragraph).