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.