HHS Top 25: One Month Until Selection Monday
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We are just over one month away from Selection Monday, so I figured it would be a good time to talk about our ballot in the context of bracketology. This far into the season, the difference between ranking and bracketology is much smaller than previously.
In our most recent Weekly Roundup, I discussed the NCAA Selection Committee’s Top 16 seeds and how I think the committee would have ranked them after a week that included seven losses in the top 16. Now, I’m going to talk about how my top 16 seeds would look compared to their ranks in our Top 25 ballot.
Below is the ballot that we submitted to the Sport Tours International/Hoopfeed Top 25 Poll, which included games played from Tuesday, February 6 through Monday, February 10 including South Carolina’s big win over UConn. Movement up or down from last week’s ballot is denoted in parentheses.
1. South Carolina
2. Baylor
3. Oregon (↑3)
4. Stanford
5. Louisville
6. N.C. State (↑1)
7. UConn (↓4)
8. UCLA
9. Maryland (↑3)
10. Oregon State (↑1)
11. Indiana (↑2)
12. Texas A&M (↓2)
13. Mississippi State (↑8)
14. Florida State (↓5)
15. Arizona
16. DePaul
17. Northwestern (↓2)
18. Missouri State
19. Kentucky
20. Gonzaga (↓6)
21. West Virginia (↓1)
22. South Dakota
23. Iowa (↑1)
24. Princeton (↑1)
25. Arizona State (↓2)
In my opinion, the largest difference between balloting and bracketology comes from how you rank teams relative to each other. Our ballot is a thought experiment of “who would win in a hypothetical game between Team X and Team Y on a neutral floor” while the selection committee seems to emphasize which team has accomplished more to date. A handful of teams’ rankings could change drastically based on which approach you favor.
Iowa and Gonzaga are prime examples of this. I have Gonzaga ranked three spots ahead of Iowa in our Top 25 ballot because I would expect Gonzaga to prevail slightly more than half the time if they played 100 games on a neutral court. However, from a body of work perspective, Gonzaga doesn’t have concrete evidence to back that up in the form of high-level wins. They haven’t played head-to-head yet, and Iowa has beat four ranked teams when Gonzaga hasn’t beat any.
However, I consider Gonzaga to be the better team by a hair based on their much stronger margin of victory (even with a slightly lower strength of schedule) which is reflected by the HHS Rating that places Gonzaga at No. 14 in the nation while Iowa is No. 21.
Some notable teams on that do not appear on my ballot, including LSU and TCU, are also likely to deserve top 25 recognition under the bracketology method purely because they have opportunities to play elite teams that teams like Gonzaga or South Dakota don’t get.
How do you think we did with our ballot? Who did we miss? Who’s too high? Too low? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter (@herhoopstats), and keep an eye out for our rankings on the Hoopfeed website throughout the season.
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