Ready or not, the upcoming men’s college basketball season is approaching.
UConn has won back-to-back collegiate national championships and looks to potentially win a third consecutive after nearly losing head coach Dan Hurley to the NBA. Meanwhile, there are plenty of old faces in new places, most notably John Calipari leaving Kentucky for Arkansas.
After another busy offseason with the transfer portal and plenty of notable freshman (e.g. Duke’s Cooper Flagg) beginning their NCAA tenures, there is a lot to keep track of before the play on the court actually begins.
One way that is often helpful to sort it out is by using advanced analytics. While these predictive metrics are by no means perfect, they give us a more comprehensive understanding of what the season could look like for every D-I team in the nation.
Using help from popular statisticians (e.g. Ken Pomeroy, Bart Torvik, Evan Miya, and Erik Haslam) we are able to exactly that.
The numbers next to each name represent where each team will begin each season, per each statistican.
Some math you can skip if that isn’t your thing: Our methodology involved finding the predicted net rating (or how many points per 100 possession a team will outscore their opponents) from each team on each website. We then averaged out how many standard deviations above the mean (also commonly known as a “Z-Score”) to find a total result.