Seth Davis' college basketball tiers: Does UConn still stand alone?

Instead of ranking the top 25 teams, let's group them into tiers.

In college basketball, fans like to pay a lot of attention to rankings. (Especially mine, which are always correct.) But there is usually not much difference between a team that is, say, No. 12 and on that is No. 15 on a poll or ballot. It doesn’t matter where you’re ranked. What matters is where you stand.

As such, I am here to assess the current state of college basketball by laying out the top teams in tiers. The idea is to group teams together with similar prospects, and more important, to identify where the fault lines are. I will update the tiers periodically as we move closer to March Madness – which, gloriously, is less than four weeks away.

These teams are listed in each tier in alphabetical order.

TIER ONE: Houston, Purdue, UConn

I would have put UConn on its own level, but the Huskies’ 19-point loss at Creighton Tuesday night served as a healthy reminder that sometimes we need to tap the brakes