A few weeks ago ESPN released “Prestige Rankings” for NCAA College Basketball teams from 1985 through 2008. As ESPN states, 1985 was the first year the NCAA tournament had 64 teams. After reading through their methodology and scoring system, I have come up with my own rankings for the same time period.
These rankings are solely mathematical and based off of teams’ success in the March Madness tournament rather than arbitrary criteria and point assignments.
After reading through ESPN’s rankings, the main visible flaw I found was that teams from smaller conferences were receiving much more credit than they deserved.
This is because of the emphasis on regular season wins. Teams in weaker conferences play much weaker teams; it is much easier for them to accumulate high win totals.
In addition, there is no mathematical explanation for any of the point totals that ESPN assigns. I encourage you to read through their scoring system and you will see what I mean.
In contrast, teams receive points in my rankings purely from their finish in each year’s NCAA tournament.
The scores that I give the teams for each year is essentially their rank based on what round of tournament play they were eliminated in. 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 made higher scores more valuable. I inverted the rankings; the champion receives a score of 65 and the play-in game loser receives a score of one.
6 comments Last one added 10 months ago — Leave a Comment
L.J. Burgess 10 months ago
This is going to be a 5 star learning experience.
Parts 1&2 are excelent.
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Brett Lissenden 10 months ago
Thank you. I appreciate the support.
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AJ Johnson 10 months ago
I wonder if you couldn't further rank teams that did not make the NCAA tournement by how they faired in either the NIT, or their own conference tournaments. Of course, for 300+ teams, over 20 years, that may simply be too much to ask of anyone!
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Brett Lissenden 10 months ago
That's a great point. I actually did try to include the NIT tournament right away - however I had a lot of trouble finding the NIT brackets and results. Also, it complicates that because the NIT has changed the number of teams involved several times. I also considered the conference tournaments too -- although I'm not sure that would be any easier to find. It would also be difficult to rank the conferences against eachother in that regard. Obviously I can rank the conferences but whos to say how the 5th place Big East team stands against the 3rd place Big 12 team and stuff like that. You definitely have a good idea but I'm not sure it's something I can do as of now. If you find websites that have those information then definitely let me know and I'll consider trying to update the rankings if it's feasible.
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VUhoops.com VUhoops.com 10 months ago
Something is wrong there with a Championship being worth only 1 more point than making it to the Final.
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Brett Lissenden 10 months ago
By traditional point systems yes. But not by rank. You are only better than one additional team if you win the national championship game than you would be if you lost it.
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