2024-25 Men's College Basketball Rankings #7 - Thru 01/02/25

So much for Brown shocking the world. On to the rankings!

The Method

Basically this is the same as what I am doing for football. The components.

1. Bradley-Terry model using a small margin of victory component. This is more or less a logistic regression. A team gets 1 point for having a better rating than a competitor.

2. Head to Head record. A team gets as many points as net wins over a competitor. (no negative points for a team with a losing record)

3. Record vs Common Opponents. A pairwin here is worth 1 point.

4. Regular season leader. During the season we will use the highest rated team with the fewest conference losses (then the team with most pairwins based on criteria 1-3 as a tiebreaker). A pairwin here is worth 0.5 points. Based on how the committee seeded teams last year, 0.5 points fit the data better than 0 or 1.

   
   

For each component, a team is compared to the other 365 teams (all non D1 are treated as a single opponent) and points are awarded. Whichever head to head has more points counts a pairwin.

For example: Team A has a better rating than Team B, but they had no head to head, Team B did better against common opponents, and Team A was the regular season champ of its conference. In this example Team A has 1.5 points (1 for rating, 0.5 for reg season champ). Team B has 1 point for common record. Team A would get the overall pairwin.

Half pairwins are used for ties. The team with the most pairwins is the #1 overall team. If there is a tie in pairwins, the Bradley-Terry rating is used as a tiebreaker.

The Field of 68

Through the games of 01/02/2025. Now with some good teams playing each other, at least the field is looking like a plausible tournament field. The SoS is based on the perspective of a .500 team (using the Bradley-Terry rankings as weights)

The Bubble

The first 4 teams are in the field with byes to the Round of 64. Teams 5-8 are the play-in teams. The others are out in order. As you can see, the model is pretty dumb right now, but it is fun to watch it get smarter.

Happy New Year - Final CFB Rankings and Notes on "Deserving"

Ripped from the Headlines

Well, the largely uneventful first round of College Football Playoff games has taken place and Penn State has punched its semifinal ticket by beating Boise State. So, putting down my final rankings feels passe - but who cares? Unlike the pre-playoff rankings by the committee, I did wait for Army-Navy since both teams WERE actually good this season. So, ta da!

If we took these rankings and turned them into a CFP field, it'd have ended up like this:

• Byes: Oregon (1), Georgia (2), Boise State (3), Arizona State (4)

• Others: (5) Ohio State, (6) Notre Dame, (7) Texas, (8) Indiana, (9) Penn State, (10) Clemson, (11) Alabama, (12) Miami-FL

That said, SMU and Tennessee as 13 and 14 points to the committee's own choices not really being egregious. But ... it does get to some larger points.

On Deserving to Be There

After Notre Dame decisively beat Indiana in the first CFP game, we got this huge run of "takes" from the take industry about Indiana's worthiness to be in the field. Sean McDonough on the broadcast, normally a real pro, editorialized on Indiana's inclusion in a way that sure made it sound like it was devaluing the Big Ten. Kirk Herbstreit, went every bit as far himself. If you did not know better, it sounded like some sort of RAW-Smackdown rivalry or something. We know that ESPN has a heavy stake in the CFP and in the SEC, but this strained objectivity more than even normal.

Herbstreit's take in particular is interesting - one noteworthy quote was where he said "we’ve got to move forward with the Playoff and hope that the committee does a better job of weighing who the best 12 versus who’s the most deserving." Uh, no we don't. This sort of opinion mystifies me. Identifying the best 12 teams is unknowable and all vibes based. Do I think South Carolina could have beaten Indiana? Maybe - but it doesn't matter. After all, you do have to play the games. Identifying "the best" is impossible. But ground ruling what "is deserving" is not.

By any reasonable measure of "deserving", Indiana deserved to be there.

1. Indiana was one of the 12 best teams in the country. By measuring what we can measure - results on the field - Indiana was clearly one of the 12 best teams in the country. Pre-playoff, I had them at #7. ESPN's current College Football Power Index has them at #10. Bill Connelly's SP+ rankings also placed them in the Top 10. That a higher ranked team beat Indiana decisively at home means nothing here. After all, if the #4 team in the country beat #10 at home by double digits during the year, nobody would bat an eye. Did Ole Miss have to give up its football program because of that Georgia game last year?

2. Indiana won the games. Did Indiana beat a murderer's row of opponents? No. But they won all but one game. And the team they lost to was also CFP worthy. Indiana indeed defeated all of the teams they were better than. Ohio State didn't do that. Tennessee didn't do that. Alabama sure as hell didn't do that. With nonconference schedules set centuries in advance, teams can only control year n strength of schedule so much. Indiana played the hand it was dealt as well as anybody.

3. Indiana had a successful season. Based on the winning games and whatnot, Indiana achieved its season goals better than other teams in its cohort. Do we really want to get into not rewarding successful seasons? At minimum, a playoff should do that.

4. Apparently, none of the other first round losers deserved to be there either. You know who is a pretty good SEC team. Tennessee. They looked every bit as helpless in their first round game as Indiana did. Same can be said for SMU, the ACC runner up - but I am not piling on there.

5. Most early round playoff games suck. This is a hard reality that fans of an expanded playoff need to accept. Hell, most of the semifinals in the 10 year run of the 4-team CFP stunk! I mean, we love March Madness - but most first round games THERE suck too. There are a few gems, but those gems are paying for a lot of 30 point snoozers. Now, in the future there WILL be a 12-5 upset or something, and it will be awesome. But unlike March Madness, we can't will one every year.

   
   

Fixing the Playoff for Year 2

Honestly, the playoff has been fine - and this is writing after 3 games of the quarterfinals are in the book. The sport wants the extra money of the games, and there is some level of additional legitimacy to a playoff where not all of the FBS schools have a legit pathway to a national championship. (not saying there is a likely one) But there is one giant, flashing red flag we have seen - the seeding treatment for the automatic bids.

Based on how the college football playoff committee ranked the teams, the quarterfinals ended up being #3 vs #11, #4 vs #9, #1 vs #6 and #2 vs #5. These are pretty unbalanced brackets, and they can be traced to giving Boise State and Arizona State the #3 and #4 seeds. Giving conference champions a bye to the quarterfinals is fine. But the higher seeding is a road too far, and skews things too much. After all, Arizona State DID get credit for winning the Big 12 from the CFP committee. I mean, they moved up 3 spots in the rankings! The tournament did not need to give ADDITIONAL seeding credit. This doesn't happen in basketball.

One suggested remedy might be to just give the "Top 4" teams the top 4 seeds and byes. This is likely what will happen - but to me that again introduces the whole vibes thing that gets away from "most deserving". My approach is a simpler hybrid approach.

• The Top 4 conference champs get a bye to the quarterfinals

• The quarterfinals are seeded based on the final committee rankings.

If we did that the quarterfinals would have been:

• (1) Oregon v (12) Arizona State

• (2) Georgia v (9) Boise State

• (3) Texas v (8) Ohio State

• (4) Penn State v (5) Notre Dame

Here, the matchups are much more balanced across the four than in previous. Oregon might have lost by 10 million points anyway, but it would be a better balance of interests.

Of course, I should be in charge of everything.

2024-25 Men's College Basketball Rankings #6 - Thru 12/26/24

Ohio State's blowout of Kentucky at the CBS Sports Classic in New York might have been the best nonconference win of the season any team has had - a shocking 20 point rout that moved Ohio State firmly in the field. Duke has been outstanding lately too, and stands with Iowa State as the bulwarks against SEC domination.

The Method

Basically this is the same as what I am doing for football. The components.

1. Bradley-Terry model using a small margin of victory component. This is more or less a logistic regression. A team gets 1 point for having a better rating than a competitor.

2. Head to Head record. A team gets as many points as net wins over a competitor. (no negative points for a team with a losing record)

3. Record vs Common Opponents. A pairwin here is worth 1 point.

4. Regular season leader. During the season we will use the highest rated team with the fewest conference losses (then the team with most pairwins based on criteria 1-3 as a tiebreaker). A pairwin here is worth 0.5 points. Based on how the committee seeded teams last year, 0.5 points fit the data better than 0 or 1.

   
   

For each component, a team is compared to the other 365 teams (all non D1 are treated as a single opponent) and points are awarded. Whichever head to head has more points counts a pairwin.

For example: Team A has a better rating than Team B, but they had no head to head, Team B did better against common opponents, and Team A was the regular season champ of its conference. In this example Team A has 1.5 points (1 for rating, 0.5 for reg season champ). Team B has 1 point for common record. Team A would get the overall pairwin.

Half pairwins are used for ties. The team with the most pairwins is the #1 overall team. If there is a tie in pairwins, the Bradley-Terry rating is used as a tiebreaker.

The Field of 68

Through the games of 12/26/2024. Now with some good teams playing each other, at least the field is looking like a plausible tournament field. The SoS is based on the perspective of a .500 team (using the Bradley-Terry rankings as weights)

The Bubble

The first 4 teams are in the field with byes to the Round of 64. Teams 5-8 are the play-in teams. The others are out in order. As you can see, the model is pretty dumb right now, but it is fun to watch it get smarter. With the win at Gonzaga, UConn is back firmly in the field of 68.