Conference previews, Monte Carlo style

As done in this space last season, it’s time to look at how conference races might shake out based on what my ratings say to this point. The ground rules are similar to last year: I’ll use the current ratings for each team, simulate the conference season 10,000 times and record which team gets the one-seed for its conference tournament in each case. Many conferences have already played a few games and those games are included in the simulations. Since conference tie-breaking logic is largely random, I don’t make any effort to break ties in the simulations. If there’s a tie in a single simulation, the tied teams are each given a fraction of the conference title. The results of all of the simulations are listed for each conference and if a team is listed having won zero simulations, that means it was involved in a single case of a multi-team tie for first. Teams that did not win or tie in a simulation are not listed. Note that there is no provision for the ratings being inaccurate....