Sunday, October 27, 2013

Preseason Ratings Bowl

Okay, here it is: the final preseason ratings I will offer. Unless I change my mind.

I've expanded this from a top 40 rating to a top 50. Because I care. I also confirmed that I rated every team that received votes in the preseason coaches' pool, and every team that appears in Ken Pomeroy's preseason top 75, and Dan Hanner's top 70 teams.

There are some significant differences from the previous top 40 I posted. First, I fixed a lot of mistakes and added a bunch of new information. For example, Vanderbilt was previously rated highly, but I've since learned that two players who I expected to play major roles have left the program. I'm sure there are still mistakes, but whatever.

Second, I've changed how I account for freshmen. Previously, I'd given extra credit only for top-10 recruits. This led, in particular, to my model rating Kentucky and Kansas significantly lower than the conventional wisdom. So I decided to rejigger this to add extra credit for top-20 recruits. Now Kentucky is number 1 and Kansas moves up to 8th from 18th or so. Kentucky's recruiting class is absolutely ridiculous.

Of course, I also changed the source data from Kenpom 1.0 to Kenpom 2.0

So, below are the Torvik Top 50. I've also included comparisons to Pomeroy's top 50 and Hanner's top 50. As Chorlton mentioned before, it is interesting to look for outliers and variance. In my ratings, the outliers of are:

Saint Louis at 13 (high)
Missouri at 27 (high)
Syracuse at 31 (low)
Marquette at 36 (low)
Utah State at 34 (high)

Syracuse and Marquette are rated low mainly because they will be relying heavily on freshman (and, in Syracuse's case, a transfer) who don't get any credit in my system. Time will tell if they deserved any credit.

Utah State is an interesting one because I didn't include them in my original ratings. But I added them after seeing that they rated 58th in the Hanner ratings. They return virtually all their minutes, and have a number of young, efficient players. It will be interesting to see how they do.

Overall, there is a lot of agreement in the ratings. Of my top 50 teams, 43 appear in Hanner's top 50, and 40 appear in Pomeroy's. Of my top 20 teams, 16 appear in both Hanner and Pomeroy. Overall, there are 38 consensus teams in the top 50 and 14 in the top 20.

Anyhow, at the end of the season I'll compare these ratings to the tournament S-Curve and we'll see who gets the best of it.







Team T-Rank Kenpom Hanner
Kentucky 1 5 1
Florida 2 3 5
Louisville 3 1 2
Duke 4 6 6
Michigan St. 5 2 3
Ohio St. 6 7 7
North Carolina 7 10 13
Kansas 8 8 4
Gonzaga 9 18 18
Connecticut 10 11 25
Virginia 11 19 11
Michigan 12 12 12
Saint Louis 13 31 24
Wichita St. 14 40 23
Georgetown 15 14 31
Wisconsin 16 22 10
Arizona 17 23 8
Memphis 18 16 15
Oklahoma St. 19 4 9
Creighton 20 13 19
Villanova 21 26 36
Oregon 22 56 33
Iowa 23 15 16
Stanford 24 29 38
Baylor 25 28 35
Indiana 26 25 29
Missouri 27 49 52
Saint Mary's 28 52 42
Purdue 29 30 46
Notre Dame 30 32 26
Syracuse 31 9 14
VCU 32 21 22
New Mexico 33 17 21
Utah St. 34 78 58
Harvard 35 51 27
Marquette 36 24 17
UCLA 37 27 20
Pittsburgh 38 20 28
Boise St. 39 42 41
Kansas St. 40 43 54
San Diego St. 41 64 49
Texas 42 80 67
Dayton 43 68 66
La Salle 44 55 43
Providence 45 41 50
Tennessee 46 34 34
Alabama 47 33 40
Maryland 48 44 45
Iowa St. 49 38 62
Vanderbilt 50 70 79


*Update: Made two small adjustments: (1) Akron, formerly #45, drops out after I learned last year's starting point guard was kicked off the team; and (2) Arkansas, formerly #47, drops out after I learned that Hunter Mickelson transferred to Kansas. Vanderbilt sneaks back in at #50.

No comments:

Post a Comment