We’re coming to the end of the 2008-09 preseason materials with the release of today’s Blogpoll. Again, if you’re new to the site or simply drank away your memory in the offseason, RTC, along with a cadre of a dozen or so college hoops bloggers, misfits, rogues and malcontents submits a weekly blogpoll to Gabby at March to Madness, the chief scalawag. He organizes and tallies everything and sends it back to us so that we can throw it up on our blogs, thereby increasing our post counts and our worthy contributions to the college basketball canon. Some quick analysis below…
Comments.
El Numero Uno. UNC was everyone’s #1 team, including ours, and even though we chose Louisville to win it all in our bracket post earlier this week. Does that make us inconsistent? Wishy-washy? A flip-flopper? Nah. UNC is the best team in America on paper at the beginning of the season (now). But they’ll get upset by the second-best team (on our ballot) in America on paper in April. How’s that for nuance?
Teams Overrated by the Bloggers (in our view). UConn, Pitt, Texas, Oklahoma, Miami (FL), Marquette, Wake Forest. And no, we don’t hate the Big East, Big 12 or ACC. Here are our reasons, respectively: no NCAA wins, weak perimeter shooting, no DJ Augustin, Griffin might be expected to do too much, can’t sneak up on folks this year, no inside game whatsoever, waaaay too green for prime time.
Teams Underrated by the Bloggers (in our view). Gonzaga, Purdue, Davidson, Florida, Baylor. Reasons: Heytvelt is healthy again, love Matt Painter, Curry, the locker room incident last year, we just have a thing for Bears.
Biggest Variance (aka Nobody Knows WTF to Do With These Teams). Standard Deviation (Std Dev) refers to the amount of variance in the blogpoll votes for a specific team. If everyone chooses a team at the same spot (i.e., UNC at #1), there is no variance and therefore the Std Dev is 0.00. If, on the other hand, a team is picked all over the place – Notre Dame, Duke, Purdue and Wake Forest come to mind – the Std Dev will be relatively high. Each of these teams was ranked as high as the Top 10 on some ballots, and unranked completely on others. For example, M2M justifies his omission of Duke on his blogpoll post.
View Comments (2)
Uconn is my least favorite team in college basketball but I don't see how they are being over ranked.
OWS: the basis is that, yeah, they have a lot of talent, but this group has never won an NCAA game together. First round loss to SD last year. Two years ago didn't even make the NCAAs. Plus there always seems to be an undercurrent of turmoil surrounding this group of players. We'll see how it shakes out, but we're not riding the UConn bandwagon right now.