Arkansas (if they get Nick Smith back from Injury they could be higher)
In terms of the eye test. In terms of official ranking UVA has to be ahead of Tennessee and Creighton due to our wins and Tennessee’s early loss vs Colorado.
UConn looks really good. I believe they were missing a starter and also Alex Karaban in their scrimmage vs us.
Edit: Duke is NIT bound if Roach is injured/gimpy throughout the season. Also Illinois might be a sleeper. Freshmen guards and a few transfers so it will take time to gel. The fact that they went head to head with us, returning a big veteran core who also had the italy trips, shows there is a high ceiling there.
I have been pretty impressed with a lot of those teams and I honestly like flying under the radar. That said - Duke in the top 10 feels like the obvious “wut?”
It’s just the blatant Big 10 and Duke homerism that drives me crazy with Katz. It’s not just this ranking it’s all of the time. And then every year when the B1G teams all choke in March he excuses it as a fluke. Maybe one or two years would be a fluke but 21 years? That’s just a conference lacking high end talent.
Who has Indiana played to justify being ahead of us? Nobody. Uconn? How is Purdue number 1 ahead of Arizona and 10 spots ahead of us? It’s just stupid. The only way it makes sense is if your priors are ‘Duke is awesome’ and ‘Baylor isn’t that good’ and I strongly disagree with both of those.
As everyone here knows, rankings mean nothing in November. In fact, in my opinion, they don’t mean much until the end of February at which point they can begin to have an influence, however slight, on NCAAT seeding. For now, the rankings tell us more about those doing the ranking than the teams which are being ranked.
Actually they are more accurate at predicting NCAAT success in November than in February/March. It gets more and more accurate until about week 6 and then gets worse for a while until it levels off at at a not very accurate level for the rest of the year.
I think that there may a reason for that. I have a suspicion that there is a relationship between past NCAAT experience, and future NCAAT success. Couple with that all the usual suspects have that tournament experience, and that they tend to garner more attention at the start of the season, and you can build an argument from there. Or not.
Best explanation I’ve seen is the human brain’s limit on interpreting data. In that like week 5-7 window we have enough information to make some conclusions but not so much that we can’t make sense of it all. After that there just are too many data points.
Other factor I think is that’s the timeframe teams are actually playing top teams from other conferences. How they fair in those games is probably a better predictor of tournament success than conference play where every body knows each other so we’ll.
I believe KenPom has argued/speculated that it’s because early in the season the voters vote on who the best teams are, but later in the season they vote on who has the best resumes (sometimes unintentionally, because they’ve been “laddering” all season long – e.g. “Team X lost so I have to move them down a bit…” etc.).
