NKY Bracketology Top 25 W/Michael & Zach

Hi everyone! Welcome to our top 25! This will be a running top 25 we will update every week!

Below, you will find further rationale for why each team is ranked where they are right now, and any further details!

Be sure to follow myself (@BracketNKY), Michael (@mikezor052588), Zach (@ZachAbott19) to stay up on EVERYTHING college basketball this year!

Breakdown of each ranking!

Michael: Explanation for my rankings. I’m doing my best to avoid preseason bias and rank these top 25 teams according to resumes. Bare with me there are probably some teams that I could have ranked but missed and part of that is because there are 362 DI teams! I got Arizona at 1 because that win at Duke will be hard to top as the best win of the season. I put JMU at 2 because they might already have 2 Q1 Ws in the first week of the season with wins at Michigan St. and Kent St. USC is at 3 after an impressive week including easily defeating Kansas St., Tennessee won at Wisconsin. Baylor rounds out the top 5 after rallying to beat Auburn. Memphis is next after winning at Missouri. Texas A&M won at Ohio St. How about BYU knocking off last year’s runner up SDSU! Gonzaga is next after pulling away from a solid Yale team. Virginia rounds out the top 10. Weber St. (W at SMC), Nevada (W at Washington), Oregon (solid W over Georgia), Princeton ( W NC over Rutgers and W at Hofstra), and FAU (W basically at Loyola) is 11-15.16 is Michigan after dominating 2 teams that won their regular season title last year. Akron had a nice week knocking off SDST and USM, Duquesne looked really good this week as did Bradley beating UAB and Utah St., Clemson after winning the Asheville MTE is at 20! Current Will Wade coach’s team, McNeese knocked off his former School VCU to highlight them being at 21. Kansas, Purdue and UConn had little trouble with vastly inferior schools while others in that same realm weren’t as fortunate. Duke rounds out the top 25 as they were right there with Arizona.

Zach: I'm not going to get into too much detail about specific teams, but basically, I use a regression model to project a team's results at home and away against the rest of D1. The model uses career points returning, head coach's win percentage, prior season win percentage, 3-year recruiting class average, and conference advantage (calculated from the win percentage of the team's conference against their opponent's conference). Each of these metrics is fairly predictive. I've used them exclusively in my daily predictions, which have gotten about 75% of games correct so far. So, in case you're wondering whether I'll use actual performance statistics, the answer is yes, I will, probably starting next week. I'm waiting to include this for two reasons: First, right now, we're just gathering data, but we don't yet know how to interpret it; second, most teams have either played exclusively at home (meaning we don't know how they perform on the road) or on the road (meaning we don't know how they perform at home). The rankings are meant to be predictive.

Myself: Mine is simple. This week it is a mixture of preseason rankings and the results we've seen! After this, it will be the top 25 teams in my seed list!