INeedMoreCreativity's Week Pre-Season Ballot

Rank	Team	Reason
1	Houston	Difficult to see Houston missing a step when they return most of their production and they have the best defensive coach in America
2	Duke	Most talented team and it's not close
3	Kansas	Not currently seeing KU on the level of Houston or Duke. Dajuan or KJ need to be able to space the floor else the rest of the team has to shoot lights out. Very experienced
4	UConn	Not returning much or bringing much in but I trust Hurley
5	Alabama	Oats' oldest team at Bama. Not returning a lot but I trust him
6	Gonzaga
7	Auburn
8	North Carolina
9	Arizona
10	Iowa State
11	Baylor
12	Tennessee
13	Creighton
14	Purdue
15	St. John's
16	Texas
17	Arkansas	Calipari I give more credit than most. I think he's just had some bad luck lately
18	Texas Tech
19	Illinois
20	Kentucky
21	Texas A&M
22	Michigan State
23	Marquette
24	Villanova
25	BYU

Overall Rationale

In preseason I try to look at talent, returning production, and coaching. Not relevant for preseason, but most weeks I rank teams mostly by resume, as if the season ended today and I were ranking them for the tournament. I am not trying to find the “best” team, I’m trying to find the “most deserving team”. In other words, my rankings are backwards-looking, not forwards-looking. ------------ I use eye-test evaluations along with computer metrics to inform my rankings. I do not place additional weight on more recent games. Having a good record relative to SOS is the most important thing for my rankings. Sometimes, a team may have an excellent resume despite poor SOS (such as previous years’ Gonzaga), or a poor resume despite a great SOS (some .500 power conference teams). If your team wins more games against its schedule than other teams would win against that same schedule, then your team has a good resume. ------------ FAQ: ------------ 1. Why is my team ranked so low? My team is ranked #5 in kenpom! -- It’s likely that your team has a resume that’s relatively poor. I bet your team will do pretty well later in the season, but until then, I’ll rank the team with the better resume higher. ------------ 2. Why is that team ranked so high? They don’t even have any ranked wins! -- That team likely still has a good resume! A win against an okay team can be just as good as a win against a great team, depending on where the game is played. An average top-25 team is as likely to win on the road against the #75 team as it is to win hosting the #10. ------------ 3. How do you have Team A ranked over Team B? Team B just whalloped Team A! -- Single game results are only a small part of a team's larger whole body of work. Team A dropped in my rankings according to how bad their loss was, and Team B rose according to how good their win was. I don’t assign any additional weight to the game.