AP and Coaches' 2020 Polls

[fisheyes]

Looking good at #4!

Kansas (47)
Gonzaga (15)
Louisville (1)
Duke (2)

Don't bother searching for the cheaters!

[JasonEvans]

Don't bother searching for the cheaters!

6 years, 106 consecutive polls... buh-bye.

[Hartford Dukie]

First NET rankings are out and has Duke crazily at 13 - though Duke has the most Quad 1 wins (4) of any team - but only top 30 team with a Quad 3 or 4 loss. cheaters are #95

https://www.cbssports.com/college-ba...n-diego-state/

Didn't mean to post smily next to NET rankings - except for cheats.

[SkyBrickey]

Taking a look at our schedule and it sets up pretty well for us this year. Our three toughest remaining games (on paper) are:

Louisville (3) - home - 1/18
Florida St (19) - home - 2/10
Virginia (9) - away - 2/29

We also have to go play at Clemson, Wake Forest, Syracuse, NC State, and UNC - all I'm sure will be battles as usual. And GT has a couple of players coming back and may be a tough game in Atlanta.

[DU82]

First NET rankings are out and has Duke crazily at 13 - though Duke has the most Quad 1 wins (4) of any team - but only top 30 team with a Quad 3 or 4 loss. cheaters are #95

https://www.cbssports.com/college-ba...n-diego-state/

Didn't mean to post smily next to NET rankings - except for cheats.

The UK home loss to Evansville was quad 2? Or are they not top 30?

[Dr. Rosenrosen]

6 years, 106 consecutive polls... buh-bye.

How’d they even get 1 vote let alone 41?

[Hartford Dukie]

The UK home loss to Evansville was quad 2? Or are they not top 30?

Kentucky is #58!

[devildeac]

How’d they even get 1 vote let alone 41?

One vote for each point The Old Ball Coach and his crew hung on them "back in the day."

[uh_no]

First NET rankings are out and has Duke crazily at 13 - though Duke has the most Quad 1 wins (4) of any team - but only top 30 team with a Quad 3 or 4 loss. cheaters are #95

https://www.cbssports.com/college-ba...n-diego-state/

Didn't mean to post smily next to NET rankings - except for cheats.

worrying about NET rankings at this point doesn't mean too too much as they have no pre-season bias.

Also a friendly reminder that NET is not meant to be a predictor...therefore doing things like actually rewarding wins, or having a heavy fall off in weight as victory margin grows are reasonable things to do. (not that it's prerfect...but it incentivizes the type of scheduling the ncaa (and us) would like to see far better than RPI ever could)

[JasonEvans]

First NET rankings are out and has Duke crazily at 13 - though Duke has the most Quad 1 wins (4) of any team - but only top 30 team with a Quad 3 or 4 loss. cheaters are #95

SFAustin is a very respectable 74 in the NET ratings... but playing that game at home still makes it a Quad 3 loss for Duke. Ouch.

[brevity]

How’d they even get 1 vote let alone 41?

College Poll Tracker is your new best friend.

The breakdown of votes for UNC shows that only 8 of the 65 AP voters kept them in the Top 25. For 7 of them, UNC was ranked #20 or lower.

Then there's Scott Wolf, who has them at #14. He also is one of three voters putting Duke at #10, lower than everyone else.

scottwolf.jpg

Normally I wouldn't call out anyone based on their looks, but he has not aged well since Party of Five.

[uh_no]

SFAustin is a very respectable 74 in the NET ratings... but playing that game at home still makes it a Quad 3 loss for Duke. Ouch.

does quad factor in much at all anymore?

NVM: i see. they take net and then use that to make the quads.

[Hartford Dukie]

Behind Kansas and Gonzaga

https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/rankings

But unbelievably have the cheats at #23

[Bob Green]

But unbelievably have the cheats at #23

Gonzaga will take care of that.

[MartyClark]

Gonzaga will take care of that.

Maybe wishful thinking but hopefully UCLA, the next game, puts another nail in the Carolina coffin

[CameronBornAndBred]

But unbelievably have the cheats at #23

Eh, they have the embarrassing honor of being the only team with 4 losses. Question is, who is it more embarrassing for...the team or the folks that voted for them.

[sagegrouse]

Behind Kansas and Gonzaga

https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/rankings

But unbelievably have the cheats at #23

This is a "failure to penalize" UNC for poor results on the court due to the anticipation that Cole and Leaky will return (or else Roy is paying his friends in the coaching profession).

[Reddevil]

This is a "failure to penalize" UNC for poor results on the court due to the anticipation that Cole and Leaky will return (or else Roy is paying his friends in the coaching profession).

In fairness, the losing is not limited to the basketball team and is available to the entire student body so...

[scottdude8]

SFAustin is a very respectable 74 in the NET ratings... but playing that game at home still makes it a Quad 3 loss for Duke. Ouch.

Actually, that makes it a Q2 loss: Q2 is Home 31-75. That said, I've got a sneaky suspicion that SFA's NET rating is artificially skewed by that win, and it will more than likely end up being a Q3 loss by season's end.

I was curious about this loss, so I went back and looked at the final "Team Sheets" from last season. The highest NET ranked team with a Q3 loss was No. 7 Texas Tech, which earned a 3-seed in the Tourney. Purdue also had one, was NET No. 11, and a 3-seed. The next "major conference" (i.e. not Buffalo) team with a Q3 loss was Maryland, who were NET No. 25 and a 6-seed. All of this is to say the following: there doesn't seem to be a comparable situation to Duke and Kentucky's bad losses in last year's NET rankings (i.e. a team in real contention for a No. 1 seed with this bad of a loss), which means we're heading into uncharted waters this year. How the committee ends up viewing those losses is going to be a huge wild-card!

An interesting note: while there are officially the four "quadrants", on the team-sheets each quadrant is further split in half for more differentiation. Not only does Duke have four Q1 wins that are likely to hold up, they also have two "top-half" Q1 wins in N Kansas and @ MSU that will likely hold up. That, along with the obvious possibility for us to get more wins of that caliber playing in the ACC, is going to be a potential differentiator and something that could offset the SFA loss.

Something else interesting: Gonzaga has already played four "top-half Q1" games and is 3-1 in them. The UNC game will probably end up a low end Q1 or at worst a Q2 game by season's end, and BYU and Saint Mary's are good enough this year that the conference schedule should provide another one or two Q1 opportunities for the Zags when they play those teams on the road. With that setup and their non-conference resume, it's going to be hard to knock the Zags off of the one-line in the West barring an unusual string of losses. So we may be competing with teams like Ohio State, Maryland, Kansas, Louisville, Virginia, etc. for just three obtainable No. 1 seeds.

Almost time for me to get back to my deep-dive "Net News" articles... that means it's officially official that it's CBB season

[UrinalCake]

worrying about NET rankings at this point doesn't mean too much as they have no pre-season bias.

Yeah, I remember last season when the first NET rankings came out they were largely lambasted as they contained many statistical outliers. But by the end of the season they turned out to be pretty accurate. That first ranking even had Texas Tech at #1 if I remember correctly, which everyone said was absurd but then they wound up making the Final Four.

This season the NCAA waited for a couple more weeks into the season before releasing the first set of rankings, but I think everyone knows to be patient and let them adapt as the season progresses. The tournament isn’t being played today. For us to be #35 with that terrible (on paper) SFA loss on our resume and a small total number of games is perfectly reasonable.