Method
MRI is a computer rating system. Ben ran it as an Excel workbook for college football and college basketball; the basketball workbooks stop at 2019–20. This is the same idea rebuilt, and carried forward through the seasons in between.
The rating
Every game becomes one equation —
margin = rating(home) − rating(away) + home court
— and the whole season is solved at once. A team's rating depends on its opponents' ratings, which depend on theirs, all the way down, so strength of schedule is not a separate statistic bolted on afterwards. It is what the solution is made of.
- Margin is compressed. A 30-point win is worth more than a 20-point win and not very much more, through a curve that is near-identity inside a normal result and flattens past it. Nothing is gained by running up a score.
- Ratings are pulled toward last season's so November means something. The pull fades on its own as games accumulate, and it is gone well before conference play.
- Home court is estimated from the games rather than assumed, and neutral sites are excluded. It sits at 2.7 points here, and has run between 2.7 and 3.3 across the six rebuilt seasons.
- Non-Division-I opponents are rated individually rather than pooled, so a November exhibition against a good one is not the same result as a November exhibition against a bad one.
Two numbers
Power answers how good a team is, in points against an average Division I team, so the gap between two teams is a predicted spread. Résumé answers what a team has earned, measured as wins above what an average team would have managed against the same schedule at the same venues. They are different questions and they are published separately.
What is and is not established
The original formula was ported and checked against the surviving workbooks: it reproduces every published rating in 2012–13, 2017–18, 2018–19 and 2019–20 to floating-point tolerance. That is the part that is proven.
Ratings since then are a chain: 2019–20 primes 2020–21, which primes the next, through to now. Walking forward within each season — fit on the games played, score the games that come next — the model calls about 70% of games correctly with a mean margin error near 9.3 points.
Its settings were searched over 80 combinations and the search found nothing that beat the starting guesses on seasons it had not seen. That is reported here because it is true: at this many games per team the knobs stop mattering, and a tuning exercise that claims a win it did not get is worth less than one that admits it.
What it cannot do
A margin error near 9.3 points is about where college basketball closing spreads sit. As with football, that is the honest signal that this should not be expected to beat a closing line. There is no betting page for basketball and there will not be one unless a backtest earns it.