November 4, 2017 - by David Hess
One of our 2017 New Years resolutions (along with cutting down on sweets, and taking more “walking meetings”) was to post our 2017 college basketball preseason rankings earlier this year. And … we’ve technically stuck to that one. Last year we got these up the Saturday before the season tipped off. This year they’re up on Friday!
Last year, Duke was the obvious preseason favorite. This year, a great case could be made for a few different teams:
For our preseason projections, we rate them in the order listed above, with Duke as the #1 team. But there’s only a 0.6-point gap between #1 Duke and #4 Michigan State — meaning we’d favor Duke over Michigan State on a neutral court by less than a point. It’s essentially a 4-way toss up at the top.
Some of you may be surprised with Duke’s high ranking, given all the talent and production they’ve lost from last season. They’re one of only 9 teams returning less than 20% of both their offensive and defensive production from last season. The others are Kentucky, Oregon, California, Pittsburgh, Green Bay, North Florida, Pepperdine, and Mississippi Valley State.
Of course, that number is mitigated by a couple factors:
While not without hiccups, the overall performance of the other top rated classes has been very good:
#1: 2011-12 Kentucky … 38-2, national champs
#2: 2017-18 Duke … ???
#3: 2013-14 Kentucky … only an 8 seed, but lost in the title game
#4: 2013-14 Kansas … upset by Stanford in the second round … but they were missing Joel Embiid to injury, and obviously wouldn’t have been the #4 class without him
#5: 2014-15 Duke … 35-4, national champs
#6: 2016-17 Duke … upset in second round … 3 of the 4 main freshman missed several games, disappointing season overall, but still a #2 seed
#7: 2006-07 Ohio State … 35-4, lost in title game to Florida, which was one of the greatest teams in recent history
#8: 2005-06 Duke … 32-4, #1 seed, upset in Sweet 6
#9: 2009-10 Kentucky … 35-2, #1 seed, lost in Elite 8
#10: 2012-13 UCLA … 25-10, lost in first round
If Duke had actually returned a core of solid rotation players from last season, and added this class, they’d be the clear title favorite. As it stands, they’re still our #1, but by just a hair.
To create our preseason rankings, we first establish a baseline prediction for a team, given their power ratings from recent years, and assuming an average amount of roster turnover. Then we make some adjustments based on how much value each team is returning on offense and defense, as well as the strength of their recruiting classes from the past few years, and the value of any transfers they’ve added this season. The result is our 2017 college basketball preseason rankings. For a more complete description, check out our blog post from four years ago.
As always, we’ve refit the model during the offseason, in order to take into account another year of data.
The resulting ratings drive our preseason projections, and they serve as the Bayesian priors for our predictive ratings as the season progresses. (Translation: our preseason ratings still impact our team ratings even months into the season, because that has shown to be more predictive than not.)
Below you’ll find a preseason top 25 comparison between TeamRankings, Ken Pomeroy, Dan Hanner/Sports Illustrated, the AP poll, and the ESPN Coaches poll. And at the end of the post you’ll see the full rankings and ratings for all 351 Division I teams.
Using these ratings, we’ve run full season projections, which are live on the site now. Go check’em out! Pages include:
This is all data-driven, and automated, so it will update every day throughout the season.
Before we get to the 2017 college basketball preseason rankings themselves, it’s worth noting that Ken Pomeroy and Dan Hanner have compared our preseason ratings and/or projections with other stat-based prognosticators in past years. Our finish has been consistently good, though also consistently a bit behind Dan Hanner’s bottom-up, player-based projections. (Links below go to the comparison blog posts from Ken and Dan.)
Taking a few years of data into account, we feel we probably have the second best preseason ratings, behind Dan Hanner’s player lineup based projections, but ahead of Ken Pomeroy, ESPN, and human rankings.
We say this not to brag, but to try to preemptively defend ourselves against the inevitable “Team X is WAY too high/low! You don’t know what you’re doing!” comments. While these are by no means perfect rankings, the projections they drive have held their own in comparisons with other top projection systems. We expect them to do so again this season. We’re going to get plenty of individual teams wrong, but that’s inevitable when the challenge is to project 351 teams.
Let’s take a look at all the teams that made it into at least one preseason top 25 from among this group:
The table below lists all such teams, and shows the preseason rank in each system. It also shows the average rank, and a column indicating how far TR is from the consensus. (Positive numbers mean we project a team to rank better than the consensus, and negative is the reverse.) For teams receiving no votes in the polls, we used a rank of 50. Teams are listed in ascending order by average rank.
Team | TR | KP | SI | BT | BPI | AP | Coach | AVG |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Arizona | 2 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 11 | 3 | 5 | 3.9 |
Duke | 1 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 14 | 1 | 1 | 4.3 |
Wichita St. | 3 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 7 | 8 | 4.3 |
Michigan St. | 4 | 10 | 2 | 1 | 13 | 2 | 2 | 4.9 |
Villanova | 5 | 1 | 5 | 9 | 2 | 6 | 6 | 4.9 |
Kansas | 7 | 5 | 7 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 5.0 |
Florida | 6 | 8 | 10 | 7 | 10 | 8 | 7 | 8.0 |
Kentucky | 8 | 2 | 8 | 12 | 19 | 5 | 4 | 8.3 |
Cincinnati | 10 | 11 | 6 | 8 | 6 | 12 | 13 | 9.4 |
West Virginia | 9 | 7 | 11 | 10 | 12 | 11 | 10 | 10.0 |
North Carolina | 12 | 13 | 18 | 17 | 7 | 9 | 9 | 12.1 |
Purdue | 11 | 17 | 17 | 11 | 4 | 20 | 21 | 14.4 |
Louisville | 13 | 16 | 9 | 14 | 31 | 16 | 16 | 16.4 |
Xavier | 15 | 26 | 15 | 13 | 15 | 17 | 17 | 16.9 |
Virginia | 14 | 9 | 30 | 5 | 8 | 27 | 27 | 17.1 |
Notre Dame | 18 | 22 | 16 | 31 | 9 | 14 | 14 | 17.7 |
Miami FL | 21 | 27 | 12 | 22 | 18 | 13 | 12 | 17.9 |
USC | 19 | 12 | 13 | 20 | 42 | 10 | 11 | 18.1 |
Saint Mary's | 17 | 30 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 22 | 22 | 19.4 |
Baylor | 16 | 19 | 19 | 29 | 17 | 24 | 24 | 21.1 |
Gonzaga | 20 | 20 | 23 | 26 | 24 | 18 | 19 | 21.4 |
TCU | 24 | 14 | 24 | 25 | 5 | 29 | 30 | 21.6 |
Seton Hall | 23 | 28 | 25 | 21 | 26 | 23 | 23 | 24.1 |
Northwestern | 30 | 18 | 22 | 34 | 29 | 19 | 20 | 24.6 |
Minnesota | 22 | 36 | 26 | 40 | 21 | 15 | 15 | 25.0 |
Alabama | 26 | 23 | 21 | 28 | 30 | 26 | 25 | 25.6 |
Texas A&M | 32 | 15 | 29 | 19 | 38 | 25 | 26 | 26.3 |
Providence | 25 | 25 | 36 | 35 | 27 | 30 | 33 | 30.1 |
UCLA | 29 | 29 | 20 | 69 | 52 | 21 | 18 | 34.0 |
Oklahoma | 36 | 21 | 40 | 33 | 37 | 36 | 35 | 34.0 |
Texas | 28 | 37 | 44 | 24 | 51 | 35 | 37 | 36.6 |
Iowa State | 37 | 34 | 50 | 38 | 20 | 50 | 50 | 39.9 |
Auburn | 60 | 46 | 33 | 16 | 34 | 50 | 50 | 41.3 |
Texas Tech | 52 | 33 | 43 | 41 | 22 | 50 | 50 | 41.6 |
Missouri | 46 | 81 | 39 | 23 | 53 | 31 | 29 | 43.1 |
SMU | 39 | 24 | 63 | 74 | 35 | 43 | 41 | 45.6 |
Virginia Tech | 65 | 53 | 42 | 67 | 23 | 32 | 39 | 45.9 |
Vanderbilt | 40 | 38 | 59 | 70 | 25 | 50 | 50 | 47.4 |
San Diego St. | 62 | 71 | 47 | 18 | 105 | 50 | 50 | 57.6 |
A few points stick out:
Below are our full 2017 college basketball preseason rankings.
Keep in mind that sometimes teams can be separated by several ranking spots, but have nearly identical ratings. On the flip side of the coin, two teams can be ranked adjacent to each other, but can have a big ratings gap.
Let’s look at the top of the rankings this season for an example. #5 Villanova and #6 Florida are separated by 0.9 ratings points. That’s the same as the difference between Florida and #11 Purdue.
And a 0.9-point gap isn’t huge to begin with. Given the tight bunching at the top of these ratings, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise to see one of our top four teams finish the season outside the top 10, or for a team in the bottom half of the top 10 end the season ranked #1. That’s why they play the games!
***UPDATE***
After we posted this article, but before the season started, we made a couple adjustments based on late breaking college basketball news. We are leaving the table below unchanged, but the following changes have been made to the ratings on our site (and are reflected in our season projections):
***END UPDATE***
Rank Team Rating
1 Duke 19.5
2 Arizona 19.4
3 Wichita St 19.2
4 Michigan St 18.9
5 Villanova 18.3
6 Florida 17.4
7 Kansas 17.2
8 Kentucky 17.0
9 W Virginia 16.8
10 Cincinnati 16.6
11 Purdue 16.5
12 N Carolina 16.3
13 Louisville 15.7
14 Virginia 15.2
15 Xavier 15.1
16 Baylor 14.8
17 St Marys 14.8
18 Notre Dame 14.6
19 USC 14.5
20 Gonzaga 14.4
21 Miami (FL) 14.4
22 Minnesota 14.3
23 Seton Hall 14.3
24 TX Christian 14.1
25 Providence 14.0
26 Alabama 13.5
27 Oregon 13.1
28 Texas 12.9
29 UCLA 12.7
30 Northwestern 12.6
31 Wisconsin 12.5
32 Texas A&M 12.3
33 Butler 12.3
34 Creighton 12.2
35 Michigan 12.1
36 Oklahoma 11.8
37 Iowa State 11.8
38 Iowa 11.8
39 S Methodist 11.8
40 Vanderbilt 11.7
41 Rhode Island 11.6
42 Maryland 11.6
43 Oklahoma St 11.4
44 Arkansas 11.3
45 Kansas St 11.3
46 Missouri 11.2
47 Indiana 11.0
48 Mississippi 10.8
49 Clemson 10.3
50 St Johns 10.2
51 Florida St 10.0
52 Texas Tech 10.0
53 Marquette 9.8
54 Central FL 9.5
55 Georgia 9.5
56 Wake Forest 9.1
57 Tennessee 9.1
58 Stanford 9.0
59 S Carolina 9.0
60 Auburn 8.9
61 Bucknell 8.8
62 San Diego St 8.5
63 VCU 8.4
64 Houston 8.4
65 VA Tech 8.2
66 GA Tech 8.2
67 Utah 8.2
68 Penn State 8.0
69 Ohio State 8.0
70 Miss State 7.7
71 BYU 7.4
72 Boise State 7.2
73 St Bonavent 7.2
74 Col Charlestn 7.2
75 Georgetown 6.7
76 Temple 6.5
77 Tulsa 6.5
78 Belmont 6.3
79 LA Tech 6.3
80 Vermont 6.3
81 Nevada 6.3
82 Syracuse 6.1
83 Fresno St 5.8
84 Loyola-Chi 5.8
85 Connecticut 5.8
86 Oakland 5.6
87 N Mex State 5.5
88 Boston Col 5.4
89 Illinois 5.2
90 Dayton 5.2
91 Iona 5.1
92 Princeton 4.8
93 Middle Tenn 4.8
94 St Josephs 4.8
95 Harvard 4.8
96 TX-Arlington 4.7
97 LA Lafayette 4.7
98 San Fransco 4.5
99 Davidson 4.4
100 LSU 4.3
101 E Tenn St 4.2
102 Nebraska 4.1
103 California 4.1
104 Mercer 4.0
105 Yale 3.8
106 Fla Gulf Cst 3.7
107 Colorado 3.6
108 DePaul 3.6
109 Elon 3.5
110 Wyoming 3.4
111 Oregon St 3.4
112 N Iowa 3.4
113 NC-Wilmgton 3.2
114 Furman 3.2
115 NC-Asheville 3.2
116 Arizona St 3.1
117 Albany 2.9
118 Illinois St 2.7
119 Missouri St 2.7
120 Samford 2.7
121 Old Dominion 2.7
122 Lipscomb 2.6
123 NC State 2.5
124 S Dakota St 2.4
125 Richmond 2.4
126 Towson 2.3
127 Ohio 2.2
128 Murray St 2.2
129 GA Southern 2.2
130 Georgia St 1.9
131 Rutgers 1.8
132 Grand Canyon 1.7
133 U Mass 1.6
134 Monmouth 1.5
135 Northern Kentucky 1.5
136 La Salle 1.4
137 UC Irvine 1.2
138 Toledo 1.1
139 U Penn 1.1
140 Washington 1.0
141 W Michigan 1.0
142 Ball State 0.9
143 Denver 0.8
144 Buffalo 0.7
145 Hofstra 0.7
146 E Michigan 0.7
147 New Mexico 0.7
148 Valparaiso 0.6
149 South Dakota 0.6
150 UNLV 0.5
151 Northeastrn 0.5
152 Memphis 0.5
153 IPFW 0.4
154 S Illinois 0.3
155 Santa Clara 0.2
156 Colorado St 0.2
157 CS Bakersfld 0.2
158 Geo Wshgtn 0.2
159 Pittsburgh 0.2
160 Utah Val St 0.1
161 Ste F Austin 0.0
162 North Dakota State 0.0
163 Pacific -0.1
164 Bradley -0.1
165 Arkansas St -0.1
166 E Carolina -0.2
167 Kent State -0.2
168 Akron -0.2
169 NC-Grnsboro -0.3
170 Montana -0.3
171 Saint Louis -0.3
172 Troy -0.4
173 Weber State -0.4
174 Winthrop -0.4
175 Wofford -0.6
176 Utah State -0.6
177 Geo Mason -0.6
178 Wm & Mary -0.7
179 Lehigh -0.8
180 UAB -0.8
181 Jksnville St -0.8
182 TX El Paso -0.9
183 Evansville -1.2
184 Montana St -1.2
185 Idaho -1.3
186 Navy -1.3
187 San Diego -1.4
188 Wright State -1.7
189 UCSB -1.7
190 St Peters -1.7
191 Colgate -2.0
192 LA Monroe -2.1
193 E Washingtn -2.2
194 Hawaii -2.3
195 Cleveland St -2.3
196 Gard-Webb -2.4
197 Boston U -2.4
198 Fordham -2.4
199 E Kentucky -2.4
200 Indiana St -2.4
201 IL-Chicago -2.5
202 Liberty -2.5
203 Columbia -2.6
204 Manhattan -2.8
205 Stony Brook -2.9
206 TN State -2.9
207 Army -2.9
208 Niagara -3.0
209 WI-Milwkee -3.0
210 Drake -3.0
211 Marshall -3.0
212 Drexel -3.1
213 Coastal Car -3.2
214 Canisius -3.2
215 James Mad -3.2
216 NC Central -3.3
217 IUPUI -3.3
218 TN Tech -3.3
219 Detroit -3.3
220 Air Force -3.4
221 Nebraska Omaha -3.4
222 N Hampshire -3.5
223 Tulane -3.5
224 W Kentucky -3.6
225 Duquesne -3.6
226 Charlotte -3.6
227 Lamar -3.6
228 Wash State -3.7
229 Fairfield -3.7
230 Maryland BC -3.9
231 Chattanooga -3.9
232 Texas State -3.9
233 Loyola-MD -4.0
234 WI-Grn Bay -4.0
235 American -4.0
236 TN Martin -4.0
237 TX A&M-CC -4.0
238 Cornell -4.0
239 N Colorado -4.1
240 Radford -4.2
241 Central Mich -4.3
242 TX Southern -4.3
243 Rider -4.4
244 Mt St Marys -4.6
245 North Dakota -4.7
246 N Illinois -4.7
247 SE Louisiana -4.8
248 Sam Hous St -4.8
249 Delaware -4.9
250 Siena -4.9
251 Bowling Grn -5.0
252 St Fran (PA) -5.1
253 Lg Beach St -5.1
254 App State -5.1
255 F Dickinson -5.4
256 Campbell -5.4
257 Dartmouth -5.5
258 UC Davis -5.5
259 Youngs St -5.5
260 E Illinois -5.6
261 Holy Cross -5.7
262 Abilene Christian -5.7
263 Portland St -5.8
264 High Point -5.9
265 South Carolina Upstate -5.9
266 Loyola Mymt -5.9
267 Oral Roberts -6.0
268 Rice -6.0
269 Morehead St -6.1
270 LIU-Brooklyn -6.4
271 Seattle -6.5
272 CS Fullerton -6.6
273 S Florida -6.7
274 Portland -6.8
275 Incarnate Word -6.9
276 Austin Peay -7.0
277 Cal Poly -7.0
278 W Carolina -7.1
279 Hampton -7.1
280 Miami (OH) -7.1
281 S Alabama -7.1
282 Fla Atlantic -7.4
283 Bryant -7.4
284 UC Riverside -7.4
285 Wagner -7.5
286 Charl South -7.5
287 S Mississippi -7.6
288 Sacred Hrt -7.7
289 Massachusetts Lowell -7.8
290 Binghamton -7.8
291 AR Lit Rock -7.8
292 San Jose St -7.9
293 Brown -7.9
294 New Orleans -8.0
295 SE Missouri -8.0
296 Norfolk St -8.1
297 New Jersey Tech -8.2
298 Jacksonville -8.3
299 TX-Pan Am -8.3
300 Southern -8.3
301 TX-San Ant -8.4
302 Lafayette -8.4
303 Rob Morris -8.5
304 UMKC -8.5
305 Marist -8.9
306 Quinnipiac -8.9
307 W Illinois -9.1
308 Sac State -9.2
309 Kennesaw St -9.2
310 Cal St Nrdge -9.5
311 Morgan St -9.6
312 SIU Edward -9.7
313 N Florida -9.7
314 Alcorn State -9.7
315 Hartford -9.8
316 Houston Bap -9.9
317 N Arizona -9.9
318 Pepperdine -9.9
319 Citadel -10.1
320 North Texas -10.1
321 NW State -10.2
322 Stetson -10.4
323 Jackson St -10.6
324 St Fran (NY) -11.1
325 Maryland ES -11.2
326 McNeese St -11.2
327 NC A&T -11.2
328 Florida Intl -11.3
329 Savannah St -11.3
330 Prairie View -11.7
331 Idaho State -11.8
332 S Utah -12.1
333 Nicholls St -12.4
334 Central Ark -12.7
335 S Car State -12.7
336 VA Military -12.8
337 Longwood -12.8
338 Alabama St -13.5
339 Chicago St -13.6
340 Central Conn -13.8
341 Florida A&M -14.1
342 Maine -14.3
343 Grambling St -14.4
344 Howard -14.6
345 Delaware St -15.2
346 Beth-Cook -15.2
347 Ark Pine Bl -15.2
348 Coppin State -16.3
349 Alab A&M -17.4
350 Presbyterian -17.7
351 Miss Val St -18.6
As a final reminder, be sure to check out the season projections we create using these 2017 college basketball preseason rankings. There’s a ton to see:
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