ACC Coastal Outcomes

So, I've spent my free time at the office over the past few days creating a spreadsheet containing all of the possible outcomes in the Coastal division. There are 18 conference games remaining involving Coastal division teams, meaning there are 262,144 different possibilities for what could happen down the stretch, meaning there are 262,145 lines in my spreadsheet (including the header). Here is a breakdown of how many of those possibilities "belong" to each team, in terms of them making it to Charlotte:

Pitt: 106,078
UNC: 72,973
Duke: 72,013
Miami: 8,946
Ties broken by final CFP rankings: 1142
UVA: 985
VT: 7

So you're saying there's a chance.

Here's what the Hokies need to happen in order to make it to Charlotte. First 18 columns are the games, 0 is away team winning, 1 is home team winning. After that is the final win tallies of the 7 teams. Right-click and open the new image in a new tab to view the full size, it's over one monitor wide.

I punched the "Win Probabilities" from the source Joel uses for his Advanced Numbers articles to get an idea of exactly where we stand in terms of more realistic probabilities, since most of the game results we need are fairly unlikely (such as Pitt losing to anybody, and UVA beating anybody, and Wake Forest beating Duke, for example). Turns out that it's even worse than I expected at first glance. Assuming that the computer ranking compilation Joel uses provides accurate point spread prediction, it appears that we are looking at roughly 16 BILLION to 1 odds. Here are the numbers for the rest of the conference:

Duke: 2.483:1 (40.27%)
Pitt: 3.225:1 (31.00%)
UNC: 4.782:1 (20.91%)
Ties broken by final CFP rankings: 12.87:1 (7.768%)
Miami: 2220:1 (0.045%)
UVA: 9,532,000:1 (1.049E-5%)
VT: 16,040,000,000:1 (6.235E-9%)

Interesting that Pitt has the most possible outcomes, but Duke is the favorite to win, which makes sense since they are more likely to win more games than anyone else in the division.