KenPom, the mecca of college basketball stats websites, does a cool little pythagorean thingy to figure out who would win or lose most of the time based on stats. Think What-If Sports, only with a standing in reality. His first projections came out yesterday or the day before, I believe, and are still pretty relevant. Obviously, the data's still pretty sparse at this point, so the W/L is iffy, but it's a good objective way to get a handle on the upcoming schedule.
The weird thing about KenPom is that the W/L is based on cumulative percentages, not actual records. That's to say that, when the overall record is calculated, it's not from what the projections say, but what the percentages say. 49% and 51% aren't very different to this, even though the difference at the end of the game is stark - a W or an L. If the winning percentage is 51%, it's not as much of a win as a 80% win, if that makes any sense at all. Basically, there's give for good performances and bad performances.
In this case, Maryland is going 20-10 game-by-game, which would be a 10-6 ACC year and would get probably get Maryland into the tournament. But many of the wins are in the 50% range (FSU, BC, GT, VT) while most of the losses are lower (except for a 50%-er against NCSt). Thus, it's actually more likely Maryland would end up with 18 wins, statistically speaking.
So he's calling for an 18-12 year at this point, which is 8-8 in the ACC. At this point, I"m not sure how I feel about that. I have to think 20 wins would be closer to my guess at this point, but that's assuming they don't hit the January slump they had last year. An 18-win Sunday would be plenty interesting; a 20-win Sunday would be relatively calm.
Like I said earlier, it's very early for this stuff to be truly accurate, and stats aren't always right - that's why the play the game, it's not played on paper, so on and so forth. I just thought this was an interesting look at things early in the year.
If you're wondering why this wasn't a FanShot, simple: I had to explain this convoluted scheme. I wasn't planning having half a page of gray sitting on the front page, either.
Oh, and there's apparently no chance in hell Maryland loses to Winston-Salem State. 100% chance of victory, according to this.