Seth Davis' college basketball rankings: Hello, Florida and Washington State. Goodbye, Clemson and South Carolina.
What to do with Marquette, Kansas and Auburn following big losses? Let's ask the metrics.
Greetings, Substackers, and welcome to my weekly college basketball rankings. As always, I strive to be not only the most accurate voter but also the most transparent. So I am giving you not only my list of the top 25 teams, but also my reasoning. I’m sure you will agree with all of my opinions
This week, and each week henceforth, I am going to add a wrinkle by including each team’s status in the four major metrics. They are, in order, the NET, KenPom, KPI and BartTorvik. The NET is the NCAA’s official organizing tool and it mixes efficiency, strength of schedule, and results. KenPom is the most respected predictive metric (hi gamblers!) and includes data from the past five seasons. KPI places strict emphasis on this season’s results and schedule. And BartTorvik is similar to KenPom but has been filtered to include only this season’s games. If you want to play this game yourself, I highly recommend using Bracketologists.com, and especially their Compare Resumes feature.
BartTorvik has another category called Wins Above Bubble, which calculates how the team performed against its schedule compared to a typical bubble team, kind of like baseball’s WAR statistic for players. I have always emphasized that a top 25 ballot is not an NCAA tournament bracket, so it should include some measure of recency bias, as well as good old fashioned subjectivity. So I also filtered BartTorvik’s rankings for data since Jan. 1, and checked the teams’ overall rankings as well as their WAB rank during that period. I also looked at the teams’ performances against the four NET quadrants. You’ll see all of this information sprinkled into my analysis.
Here, then, is the correct order of the top 25 teams in men’s college basketball, as submitted to the Associated Press on Sunday night:
Dropped out: South Carolina (13), Clemson (15), Wisconsin (22), BYU (23), Indiana State (25)
Almost Famous: Gonzaga, Grand Canyon, TCU, Utah State, Virginia
NOTES ON THE VOTES
* I’ve been ranking UConn ahead of Purdue for several weeks, so I didn’t have to do any adjusting after the Boilermakers lost at Ohio State on Sunday. The Boilermakers