MIVA Tournament Projections
It is time for the madness!
MIVA Madness. MIVA-geddon. MIVA Mayhem. It doesn’t matter what you call it, the MIVA is electric. The competition will be fierce and nothing is guaranteed at this point. Let the Madness commence.
The Bracket
I am a big fan of how the MIVA has formulated their tournament. No committees, no byes, just a good, old-fashioned 8-team bracket played at higher seeds. Home court advantage is huge and teams are playing for it all season.
Ball State earned the top spot in the tournament after putting together an impressive season. It wasn’t shocking when the Cardinals took home both MIVA Player of the Year and Coach of the Year accolades this past week.
The fun part of the seedings is right in the middle. McKendree and Ohio tied at 9-7. Regardless of the tie-breaker, these two teams would face each other in the tournament. But the tie-breaker decided the home court. The teams split their season series with both away teams winning), but McKendree had the advantage in sets won in those matches 5-3.
First-year program Northern Kentucky made the tournament which is exciting to see. They just edged out Queens for that final spot. Having competitions across the board for seeds is par for the course with the MIVA. Parity, you love to see it.
Round-by-Round Projections
I used the VBelo model and simulated the Conference Carolinas tournament 10,000 times. Below are the results for how often each team progressed through the tournament.
Home Court is the name of the game for this tournament. That being said, the regular season was chaos. Of the four matchups in the quarter finals, only Ball State and NKU were a season sweep. Of the three remaining matchups, two were split by the away teams. So…this could really go a lot of ways.
Here is a look at just how chaotic the season was, according to the model. I’m not going to change the colors because I want to really show the chaos.
Ball State is the heavy favorite and that makes sense because they will never have to travel. They still have to win, but they start with the advantage. After that, the teams start to look really close. It feels like percentages mean very little to the MIVA.
Who do you think will win? Does Ball State dominate at home? Can Loyola outlast everyone? Will a lower seed go all the way?
We desperately need a quadbox on ESPN+ for this!
I don't see anybody beating Ball State. Machado just has to channel his aggression and let all of his guys eat.