For the 2018 season, 10% Ante started Maryland with 1,000 points and NJIT with 310. We basically started them where they ended last season. A legitimate question is… Is this fair? Doesn’t UMD have an unfair advantage because of this? (Undeniably, UMD starting with 690 more points than NJIT gives UMD an advantage over NJIT. The question is whether this 690 point difference is unfair or simply an accurate depiction of how much better UMD is than NJIT.) What would happen if they switched starting point numbers? So I switched their starting numbers. Currently, in the 10% Ante, Maryland has 1,000 Points and NJIT has 310.
So we switched their starting numbers. We started UMD with 310 and NJIT with 1,000.
And this is what happened…
Maryland won their first game against Navy and earned 50 points (360). Then Marist, 51 points (411). High Point, 37 points (448). Penn, 82 points (530). Notre Dame, 108 points (638). Against Albany, Maryland lost and lost 63 points (575). But bounced right back and beat Villanova to earn 120 points (695). UNC, Michigan, PSU, Rutgers, OSU and… right now, before their game against JHU, if UMD started with 310 points, UMD would have… 987 points.
On the other hand, NJIT started with 1,000 points. And, in their first game they lost to Lehigh to lose 10% of 1,000 which took them down to 900 points. Then loses to Lafayette, Army, Delaware, VMI, Quinnipiac, Princeton, UMass, St. Josephs, Fairfield, Wagner, Manhattan, Monmouth, and Georgetown which brought their point total, two days before playing UMass-Lowell to… 232 points.
In other words, in this experiment, Maryland started with 310 points and ended with 987 points, a number that is extremely similar to the initial 1,000 that 10% Ante gave UMD. While NJIT started with 1,000 points and ended with 232 points, a number that is even lower than the 310 points that 10% Ante initially gave NJIT. In other words, after 13 games, Maryland floated to their natural 1,000 level while NJIT sunk to their natural (lower than) 310 level. So returning to our original question, Is the 690 point difference unfair or simply an accurate depiction of how much better UMD is than NJIT? Personally, I believe the answer is relatively clear.
