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In 2005, while working with the Duke Basketball Report, I wrote a simple program to look at the different seeding combinations with the unbalanced schedule created by the misbegotten ACC expansion. I looked at the rules the ACC uses, and put that algorithm into a program.
For the first two years, I published the results on DBR. They are recreated here. The remaining years are published here. After leaving DBR, I published the results for friends for a couple years.
Starting in 2009, I created this website, and I began examining the seeds more than one week before the end of the season. After the penultimate weekend, there are ususally no more than 12 games to be played, which results in 4096 possible combinations. In 2009, I started with 28 games to be played, with 268,435,456 different possible combinations. Downloading all the possible combinations for 12 games is a 12 MB file; so for when there are more games than 12 to be played, I will publish only the summary of possible combinations. I also started following the seeds for the Big Ten, Big East, Big Twelve, Pac Ten, and SEC.
In 2010, I started with 34 games remaining, for 17,179,869,184 different combinations in the ACC. I also added tracking the women's teams, plus the MVC, Atlantic 10, and Conference USA.
In 2011, I've added the Big West, Colonial Athletic Association, Horizon League, Metro Atlantic, Mid-American, Mountain West, Ohio Valley, Patriot League, WAC, and West Coast. I also developed better automation, so the site will run itself. I started at the beginning of the season so the standings from day one would reflect the standing as tiebreakers were applied -- this applied directly to two conferences, the Pac 10 and Big 10, that use overall division 1 record as a tiebreaker.
For 2012, I intend to examine all conferences. The difficulty is finding the exact tiebreaker rules for each conference, particularly with the upheaval in conference membership and organization in 2012.
I also looked into adding the historical ACC results, using the current tiebreaker rules. The ACC didn't introduce the tiebreaker rules until the 1990's, so historical information is presented to show how the seeds might have been different.
I'll admit, I find it interesting to see how many different ways there are for ties to be separated. Everyone starts with head-to-head, but after that, it is a free-for-all. Most conferences have ladders, which put greater weight on beating the top teams. In some conferences, 1-0 is the same as 2-0, in others, 2-0 is better than 1-0. In 2010, I ran the ACC results against different rules, and produced some subtle differences.
Please note, these are not "odds," each game is treated as a 50-50 split. It is just a tally of possible results.