NCAA Basketball: The Real Prestige Rankings, 2000-2008

For those who may not know, last week ESPN released “Prestige Rankings” for NCAA College Basketball teams from 1985 to the present.  After reading through their methodology and scoring system, I decided to come up with my own rankings that I believe are more indicative of a team’s prestige. 

For starters, I am working on making the rankings go back to 1985, but for now I have only done back to 2000.  So these will be rankings for this decade only.  I like the idea of having more recent rankings though, because many programs do change significantly over an extended period of time.

Now for the scoring system; I decided to only base my rankings off of success in the NCAA tournament.  This is because I believe the "Big Dance" is the ultimate goal for every Division I college basketball team, and since it includes all divisions, the tournament really encompasses everyone.

The scores that I give the teams for each year is essentially just their rank for how they finished in the tournament.  For example, the champion is ranked No. 1 and the play-in game loser is ranked No. 65.

However, since I was assigning no score to teams that did not qualify for the tournament, I needed to make higher scores more valuable.  So I inverted the rankings; the champion receives a score of 65 and the play-in game loser receives a score of one.

Also, everyone losing in the same round receives the same score.  There is no discrepancy based on seed.  Here is the detailed scoring breakdown:

Champion: 65 points

Runner-Up: 64 points

Lose in Final Four: 62 points

Lose in Elite Eight: 58 points

Lose in Sweet Sixteen: 50 points

Lose in Second Round: 34 points

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