We delayed the start of the Blogpoll this year so we could get a better sense as to the first few weeks of the season, so here it is.  The blogpoll is represented through Monday night’s games (although records are current).

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A question that’s befuddled us for a long time now has been just how accurate are all these preseason polls that every media entity puts out each year are.  Remember last season – all four NCAA #1 seeds made it to the Final Four, but what was equally interesting to us was that those same four teams – Kansas, Memphis, UCLA and UNC – were also the top four ranked teams (in a different order) in both the Preseason AP and ESPN Coaches polls.  With an n=1, we know that the 2007-08 polls were extremely accurate in predicting last year’s F4 teams, but that only tells us part of the story – what we really want to know is how accurate are preseason polls in general?

To try to answer this question, we had to make some concessions.  We believe that, generally speaking, most preseason polls are largely the same, whether AP, ESPN/Coaches, CNNSI, etc.  Take for example, the blogpoll that came out this week.  The top twenty teams that the bloggers chose were mostly consensus picks – no team was left off of more than one ballot, and a total of only thirty-six teams received at least one vote.  That shows a relatively high consistency of thought – groupthink, if you will – about who the best teams in the country will be this season.  So we feel that we can derive some strong basic principles (and save a boatload of time) by examining only one of the major preseason polls – the ESPN/Coaches Poll – because it is the sole major poll that does a postseason version (after the NCAAs) to enable a fair comparison. 

We looked at the last five years where we could find the available pre- and postseason polls (the 2005 postseason poll is incorrect on both the ESPN and USA Today websites), and made some simple comparisons.  Our findings are below the table. 

Findings.

• In a given year, there are between 50-60 teams receiving votes from the preseason pollsters.  This tightens up to approximately 40 teams receiving votes in the postseason poll. 
• So how does a team receiving preseason votes equate to the postseason?  Ehhh, not terrible, but not great either.  Over the last six seasons (excl. 2005), if a team received votes in the preseason poll, there was a slightly better than half (54%) chance that it would also get votes in the postseason poll.  That alone doesn’t tell us a whole lot, though.  What if your team was in the preseason Top 25?  Those teams receive votes in the final poll approximately three-quarters (76%) of the time, which at minimum, means that the takeaway is that a preseason team receiving votes will usually make the NCAA Tournament. 
• Looking at the distribution of the final postseason polls can tell us a little bit about how accurate preseason pollsters are at predicting how good a team will be.  There appears to be a much stronger tendency to overlook teams that turn out later to be good rather than to overrate teams that turn out to not as good as pollsters thought.  Over half of the teams in a given year (~23) in the final postseason poll will have moved up >5 spots in the rankings from their initial selection; but only a handful of teams (~7) will have moved down by >5 spots from the preseason.  Another ~12 teams won’t move much from its initial standing.  This is strong evidence that pollsters generally have an accurate sense of the abilities of about 30% of teams in a given year, but they’re far more likely to underrate teams (usually by not ranking them at all) than to overrate teams (by a 3:1 ratio). 
• Some of the more notable examples of the pollsters being right on the money were in 2004, when they rated UConn/Duke as #1/#2, which is exactly where they ended the season.  Florida rated as preseason #1 in 2007 and Kansas as preseason #2 in 2003 were some other clear winners. 
• The swing-and-a-misses where the pollsters vastly overrated a team were Indiana in 2008 (#9 to #33), Duke in 2007 (#11 to #38), and Michigan St. in both 2006 (#5 to #34) and 2005 (#3 to #41).   
• The biggest misses where pollsters underrated a team was most obvious in 2003 and 2007, when preseason #31 Syracuse and #39 Florida, respectively, vaulted all the way to #1 by season’s end, and in 2004 when preseason unranked Georgia Tech made it to the F4 and #3 at the end of the year.  The only other preseason unranked team to have made the F4 in the last six years was George Mason in 2006. 

What does this mean for the 2008-09 season?  Well, if your team was ranked in the Top 25, you’re more than likely going to make the NCAA Tournament.  And if you’re already highly ranked, you should feel relatively secure in your position at or near the top – most teams simply don’t have huge drops in rankings from beginning to end of the season.  The good news is that if your team was lower ranked or not ranked at all, but you feel like they’re extremely underrated, history shows that an awful lot of teams move significantly up the rankings as the season goes along.  We’ll leave the guesswork as to who those teams might be to the rest of you guys. 

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.   

Yes, it’s that time again.  We at Rush the Court are 100% focused and ready to provide comprehensive coverage of every scrap of interesting news that occurs in college basketball this year.   The quips, the clips, the stats, and of course the commentary and analysis that so many of you come to this site for. 

We’re once again kicking off the five-month sprint from the November 10th opening tipoff  to the April 6th finish line in D-town with our Season Preview materials.  Will anyone be able to challenge the ridiculously loaded North Carolina Tar Heels for the crown?  Find out over the next several weeks as we roll out the following features beginning this weekend. 

1. Conference Primers – we have 31 correspondents lined up who are experts in each of the D1 conferences in NCAA basketball; they’ll be providing comprehensive primers on the names and games to watch for this season from the America East to the West Coast Conference.  Transitioning into the regular season, these correspondents will keep us up to date with their respective conferences as we roll on to March Madness 2009.

2. Feature Columnists – we also have several feature columnists lined up to write for us this year; one columnist will focus exclusively on Vegas odds in college basketball; another will provide quality pieces on timely issues facing the game at-large; and still another will provide an alternative voice to the one you’re already reading here every day.

3. Preseason Magazine Reviews – we did this last year, and will be doing this again this season with a few changes, including some additional analysis into the predictive acumen of these magazines.

4. Blogpoll – once again, we’ll be contributing to the preseason blogpoll and its various iterations as we progress through the season.

5.  Projected Bracket – we’re not satisfied with simply letting the correspondents have all the fun with preseason predictions; we too will be updating a projected bracket as we get closer to opening tipoff.

5. 30 Reasons – just for fun, we’re going to provide a new YouTube feature to get everyone riled up and excited for the new season: Where 2008-09 Happens – 30 Reasons We Love College Basketball.

7. Anything Else – we’ll continue with our usual fare of linkage and thought-provoking (gulp…) commentary where appropriate. If anyone has an idea of something else they’d like to see, hit us up at rushthecourt@yahoo.com.

As usual, running late…

Justifying Our Ballot. We actually had to do this for the first time all season. We ranked Florida above Mississippi St. (#25 in our ballot), and one blogger took offense with this notion. His quote was, “Ranking Florida above MSU absolutely makes no sense, however. None.” So here is our carefully-worded justification:

I just think that Florida is a better team right now than MSU. In other words, on a neutral court, I think Florida wins. I think, by and large, they have better players, better coaching, and a more impressive team. Based on the both the #s [UF is ten spots higher in Sagarin] and what I’ve seen on the court this year, I believe this to be a reasonable stance. The only way it’s an unreasonable stance (your assertion) is if you can demonstrate compelling evidence that there is absolutely no way that Florida can beat MSU on a neutral court. I don’t think you can do that based on anything we’ve seen so far this year.

What think, fair readers? Did we miss something?

Those Left Out. What we couldn’t understand was the continued inclusion of Vanderbilt, who, at ballot time, had lost three of four and were trending downward (they have since lost again last night to Ole Miss 74-58). We also had St. Mary’s at #18 (prior to their Monday night loss), Baylor at #22, and Oklahoma at #24. Obviously, as of this writing, we’d like to have K-State in the poll in favor of Baylor. All votes tallied here.

Variance. Wisconsin and Kansas St. are causing the most blogvoter consternation. We’re not sure how anyone can justify leaving the 16-3 Badgers completely out of the poll, but one blogger did.

Conference Call. The conferences who have messed up middles, as we discussed the other day, are taking hits in the poll.

• Pac-10 – 5
• Big East, SEC – 4 each
• Big 10, Big 12 – 3 each
• ACC – 2
• A10, CUSA, Horizon, MVC – 1 each

Here’s this week’s version:

Note: keep in mind the blogpoll does not take into account Tues. and Wed. night games.

Justifying Our Ballot. Frankly, there’s not much we need to justify because we’re not too much at variance with the blogworld this week. We value Indiana a little more, and Pitt/Xavier a little less, but there’s nothing in our ballot that should raise an eyebrow this time around. The two teams we submitted that were left off the blogpoll this week were Oklahoma and Arizona. But we can live with their omissions. Glad to see Drake made the list at #23, but people really need to get Clemson outta here until they get a quality win on the road.

Variance. Georgetown (from #10 to NR) and Dayton (#8 to NR) again.

Conference Call.

• ACC – 4
• A10, Big 12, Big 10, Big East, Pac-10, SEC – 3 each
• CUSA, Horizon, MVC – 1 each

We’re back in action, and actually contributing to the blogpoll again!

Note: keep in mind that the blogpoll did not take into account games from Tues. and Wed. nights (i.e., Ole Miss’s loss to Tennessee, or Clemson’s loss to Charlotte).

Justifying Our Ballot. We haven’t voted for a while, but the last time we did, we were voting UCLA #1. We still think they’re the team to beat in March, but they have sice lost to Texas, so we dropped them down a tad. Most of our colleagues are voting Memphis to the top spot, but after Carolina’s scintillating comeback win against Clemson on Sunday night, we’re convinced the Heels deserve the pinnacle for now. It’s notable that every pollster believes that Memphis or UNC is the best team in America, but nobody is voting for Kansas (also undefeated and looking great) at that spot. As for the rest of the poll, we’re pretty closely aligned with the rest of the bloggers with the exceptions of Vanderbilt (we think they’re much better than people are giving them credit for), Clemson (you’ve heard our tirades on the Tigers, but they’ll be outie next week anyway), Oklahoma (not sure why they’re rising faster than, say, Ohio St.), and West Virginia (not sold on them quite yet). We had Stanford (#21), Arizona (#23) and Notre Dame (#24) on our ballot instead.

The Curious Case of Vanderbilt. We understand Marquette, Pitt and Villanova all dropping from last week (hint: they all lost). But we wanted to figure out how an undefeated team actually fell a spot, as Vandy did (from #16 to #17) this week. As far as we can tell, APAIS.net is responsible for this strange occurrence. Slackers like us, they didn’t provide a ballot last week, but this week they ranked the ‘Dores #22, which aggregated their average total a little lower than last week. So send all your hate mail to those guys, Vandy fans. :-)

Variance. As we alluded to earlier this week in our post about the lack of parity this year, the top nine teams are tightly woven into their respective positions. Among the Top 10, only Georgetown creates some dissonance (ranked from #4 to, shockingly, STF has them unranked). Dayton and Clemson (as usual) are the other two teams that have widely variable positions this week.

Conference Call.

• Big East – 5
• Big 12 – 4
• A10, ACC, Big 10, SEC – 3 each
• Pac-10 – 2
• CUSA, Horizon – 1 each

Once again, slackers that we are, we didn’t submit a blogpoll ballot this week. But several of our colleagues did, and here was their results.

While we’ve been out of pocket, we haven’t been able to produce a blogpoll ballot in several weeks, but our fearless basketblogging cabal went on without us in the interim, and we’re now at week seven. By virtue of its scintillating second half against Georgetown last weekend, Memphis proved worthy of earning the #1 spot in this week’s poll – the third #1 team of the season (UCLA and UNC were the others).

Quick thoughts. Pitt made the biggest leap of the week (from #15 to #8), thanks to Levance Fields’ game-winning deep three against the Dookies last week. Funny how one shot can make that much of a difference. By the same token, Duke fell from #5 to #10 as a consequence of that dagger. Duke is better than we thought, but Pitt exposed their relative weakness inside – they seemed to corral just about every rebound available down the stretch. Dejuan Blair (20 rebs) in particular damn near outrebounded the Devils by himself. Clemson also made a big drop by virtue of its loss to Ole Miss last week, who effectively took its spot higher up in the rankings. We didn’t submit a ballot this week, but had we done so, Clemson still wouldn’t be ranked. We refuse to rank those poseurs until they show us once and for all they won’t tank come ACC season. And look at Bobby Thuggins at #24 – he just gets it done (in the regular season) wherever he slithers, doesn’t he?

Uncertainty. Things have pretty much begun to settle in amongst the bloggers, as the top seven are largely the same on most ballots. Everyone has Memphis or UNC in the top two, followed by Kansas (every ballot had KU #3). For some reason #14 Texas A&M is showing a large amount of variance in its placement in the poll, ranking as high as sixth in one ballot to unranked in another. Weird. As usual, and we’re partially responsible for this, #23 Clemson is also showing wide variance in its poll position, ranking as high as eleventh to also being unranked.

Conference Call.

• Big East – 5
• ACC – 4
• Big 12, Pac-10, SEC – 3 each
• A10, Big 10 – 2 each
• CUSA, Horizon, Mtn West – 1 each

Props to the A10 for stepping up and showing some game this year thus far. Dayton (@ Louisville) and URI (@ Syracuse) both have marquee road wins on their resumes, and UMass (also @ Syracuse) isn’t far behind either one. Throw in Xavier, and this could be the best A10 since the days of Chaney and Calipari – possibly a four-bid league if things break down the right way.

What a week. So we’re a little late on this week’s blogpoll, among several other things, but we’re slowly getting caught up and feel that this week’s poll is the first one that accurately captures how teams are playing several weeks into the season. We’ve had a chance to watch most of the teams in the poll ourselves, and our illustrious blogging brethren have ostensibly done likewise. So here’s Week 3 (blogger ballots located here)…

Note: blogpoll does not include 11/27-28 games.

Justifying Our Ballot. We still rank UCLA #1 and UNC #2 ahead of overall #1 Memphis simply based on the fact that we believe UCLA and UNC have beaten better teams than Memphis thus far. Memphis looked solid in CvC wins versus Oklahoma and UConn, but those teams are probably mid-conference finishers this year. UCLA has a marquee win (w/o Darren Collison) against #13 Michigan St., a team that is better than we thought; and UNC has solid wins over likely NCAA teams Davidson, Old Dominion and #20 BYU (w/o Ty Lawson). Memphis will have an opportunity this weekend to improve its standing in our eyes with a win vs. #25 USC. Like everyone else, we raised #9 Texas A&M and #6 Duke on the strength of their wins in the PNIT and Maui, respectively, and #8 Texas got a nod into the top ten by virtue of its destruction of #12 Tennessee. In the lower reaches of the top 25, we still refuse to vote for #18 Clemson despite their win at Mississippi St. We’ve been down this road before with them, and if the Tigers are 14-0 going into the game vs. UNC on January 6, then we’ll consider it. We also left BYU, Miami (FL), and USC off of our ballot, figuring that Stanford, Ohio St., Wisconsin and Baylor had put together better resumes to this point. After the ACC/Big 10 meetings the last two nights, we’re really questioning our sanity on those two midwestern teams above.

Uncertainty. We’re still seeing blogger indecisiveness when it comes to Indiana and Michigan St., but some new additions at the low range of the top 25 populate our list this week. Here are the top five most uncertain teams (remember, a high std dev means greater variation in blogger rankings of that team):

• Indiana (std dev = 6.43; range = 10 to nr)
• Pittsburgh (6.39; 8 to nr)
• Clemson (5.74; 11 to nr)
• BYU (5.44; 13 to nr)
• Michigan St. (4.83; 8 to 21)

The top seven teams in the blogpoll are also the top seven lowest standard deviation this week.

Conference Call.

• Big East – 5
• ACC & Pac-10 – 4
• Big 12 – 3
• Big 10 – 2
• Atlantic 10 , CUSA, Horizon, MVC, Mtn West, SEC, WCC – 1

Wow, the SEC is really struggling right now, with only one team ranked (Tennessee) and that squad getting its doors blown off by Texas last week. The ACC only has four ranked teams, but leads all conferences with 6 of the 31 remaining unbeaten teams in D1. Impressive that half of that league is still flawless. Other BCS unbeatens: (Big East & Big 12 – 4 each; Pac-10 – 3; SEC – 1; Big 10 – 0).