On Monday RTC’s East Coast field office submitted a piece that has driven considerable discussion, both internally and externally, as to the legitimacy of ESPN’s Prestige Rankings of college basketball programs in the 64-team era (since 1985).  While we have the utmost respect for ESPN interns researchers Harold Shelton,  Nick Loucks and Chris Fallica for plowing through mounds of college hoops data in the interest of the greater good,  Nvr1983 noted in his post that there were several areas where he (and by proxy, we) take issue with how they attributed their points (their NCAA appearance = NIT appearance is just killing us) and ultimately, the rankings.  Don’t get us wrong – overall, we think ESPN did a solid job with their effort.  We just think it could be better. 

Graphic Credit (The Hype)

With that in mind, and with the full realization that we don’t have all the answers ourselves, we took a stab at creating a new attribution of points that more accurately reflects what college basketball fans really care about.  The key difference between us and them is that we want to hear from you, the readers, what should be added, eliminated, changed, revised, re-scored, or whatever else.  Feel free to leave a comment below or simply fire us an email at rushthecourtATyahooDOTcom.  It’s not guaranteed that we’ll take every suggestion to heart in our final analysis, but in the spirit of web 2.x, we want to hear your thoughts. 

In Table A below, we show ESPN’s attribution of points, our suggested revision, and any justification as such where we felt it was necessary.  Criteria that we changed or added are represented in blue font.  Items that we removed are in gray shading.  The list is also stored on a separate Google Docs page, so you can copy/paste if you like and we can publicly update it as we move forward. 

We now submit this revised scoring attribution list to you, the readers, for public comment.