Ranking the 10 Best College Basketball Personalities to Follow on Twitter

With the start of college basketball's regular season now (mercifully) just three weeks away, it's time to make sure you're following all of the right personalities on Twitter.

It's one thing to watch college basketball games and read college basketball articles, but your full college basketball experience is incomplete without the breaking news and witty analysis you get from following these 10 people on Twitter.

The ranking system is totally subjective, but the general thought process was to ask "Who would I follow for college basketball news and notes if I could only pick one person?" After picking Jeff Goodman at No. 1 and eliminating him from further consideration, the question was asked again and again until a top 10 was created.

Obviously, you need to be following C.J. Moore, Jason King and me, but we excluded all Bleacher Report writers from consideration (because you already know to follow us).

If someone you love to follow isn't on the list, be sure to mention that person in the comments, so we can make sure we're following them as well.

Honorable Mentions

Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports

Doug Gottlieb (@GottliebShow)

If you're interested in aggregating news and information, don't bother. Gottlieb's sole purpose on Twitter is to troll.

He spent the last three months of the 2013-14 season griping about Wichita State not deserving a No. 1 seed. When Kirstie Alley comes out of nowhere to call you out, you've won the game of troll.

Mark Titus (@ClubTrillion)

Like Gottlieb, Titus isn't exactly breaking any news, but he's comically good at responding to news that has broken.

Arguably, Titus' best contributions to the Twitter-sphere are his personal vendettas against Frank Haith and Tom Crean. When one of them suffers an indescribably bad loss, Titus will go through two years' worth of someone's timeline and retweet all of the times the coach was glorified. Trust me, it's funny.

No idea if he's actually making the incredible road trip that he tweeted last month, but if he is, you need to follow him just to vicariously make that journey.

Jerry Meyer (@jerrymeyer247)

For all things recruiting, it doesn't get much better than Meyer.

But Average Joe College Basketball Fan couldn't care less which 4-star recruits in the class of 2016 are starting to visit which schools. Recommending him as a must-follow for in-season college basketball would be the equivalent of suggesting that the rest of the names on this list must be followed by all NBA fans.

10. John Gasaway

Twitter Handle: @JohnGasaway

Tweets: 9,500

Followers: 10,500

It takes a special kind of person to write more than 500 words about the New Jersey Institute of Technology's basketball team or more than 1,200 words about where Aaron Gordon's free-throw stroke ranks in the annals of history.

John Gasaway is just that person.

His stuff isn't for everyone. Ken Pomeroy gets all of the love when it comes to "advanced metrics" in college basketball, but Gasaway uses them almost more intensely than Pomeroy does.

But if you're a nerd for hoops numbers, your in-season Twitter game would be incomplete without following Gasaway.

9. Gary Parrish

Twitter Handle: @GaryParrishCBS

Tweets: 34,500

Followers: 93,000

Like Doug Gottlieb, Gary Parrish is the host of a sports radio show. If you're exclusively looking for college basketball insight, you'll have to sift through a lot of NBA, NFL and college football musings on his Twitter feed until the NCAA tournament begins.

But unlike Gottlieb, Parrish doesn't start vendettas against teams. Save for a slight slant toward Memphis—not surprising, considering that's where his show is recorded—Parrish covers college basketball more objectively and extensively than the vast majority of radio hosts.

He doesn't break much news and uses a not insignificant percentage of tweets to promote his own articles and his radio show, but he's worth a follow nonetheless. If you disagree, the "unfollow" button isn't hard to find.

8. Jay Bilas

USA TODAY Sports

Twitter Handle: @JayBilas

Tweets: 26,000

Followers: 748,000

Follow Jay Bilas just to get a daily line from a Young Jeezy song every morning at roughly 6 a.m. ET. Keep following him for solid basketball analysis.

Actually, it's hard to remember what Bilas tweets about in season, because he has spent the past six months leading the crusade against the NCAA.

Bilas spent the first two months of the summer informing his followers of the injustice and red tape surrounding Leticia Romero's request to transfer away from Kansas State. He spent the rest of the summer pointing out the hypocrisy of NCAA making money by using an unpaid player's likeness—be it Jameis Winston, Johnny Manziel or Zach LaVine.

Bilas has never been shy about expressing his belief that players should be paid, and that's what makes him a must-follow. While others in the industry blandly state the facts about things like the Ed O'Bannon trial, Bilas passionately informs his legion of followers about the ramifications of virtually every move (or non-move) the NCAA makes.

His agendas may be insufferable at times, and he's definitely arrogant 95 percent of the time, but he's a brilliant guy who isn't afraid to peek behind the NCAA's curtains and let us know what he sees.

7. Joe Lunardi

Greg Carroccio/Associated Press

Twitter Handle: @ESPNLunardi

Tweets: 3,500

Followers: 120,000

Joe Lunardi isn't necessarily the best bracketologist in that business of educated guessing, but he is certainly the most well-known.

Adding to his radio and TV appearances, Lunardi drastically stepped up his Twitter game this past season. His responses are short and not always sweet, but he answered dozens of fan questions about tournament scenarios on a nearly nightly basis over the final month of the season leading up to Selection Sunday.

Also, every week or so, he would tweet his updated S-curve, ranking the projected field from No. 1 through No. 68 and giving fans a good approximation of how the selection committee would perceive the teams if the season ended then and there.

We'll see if he becomes even more dedicated to social media this year. Lunardi joined Twitter in December 2009 and has about as many tweets in his "career" as some of these guys have in a month.

6. Rob Dauster

Twitter Handle: @RobDauster

Tweets: 64,500

Followers: 12,000

What I love most about Rob Dauster is that he does features on players that most fans have never heard of. This seems appropriate, because at "just" 12,000 followers, he's a writer that few fans know.

While the bigwigs are writing about Andrew and Aaron Harrison, Dauster is writing about how Martez Harrison might be what finally puts the University of Missouri–Kansas City on the map.

Or how Cody Larson is trying to fulfill what used to be "next big thing" potential back in his home state of South Dakota.

Or how John Brown (High Point) transformed from a quarterback to probably the best player virtually no one is talking about.

And those are just pieces that he has posted in the past 10 days. Who knows what else he has in store for the rest of the (pre)season?

I just stumbled upon Dauster over the summer, so I'm looking forward to seeing what he brings to the Twitter table during the season.

5. Jon Rothstein

Dan Harr/Associated Press

Twitter Handle: @JonRothstein

Tweets: 50,000

Followers: 44,000

There is a palpable buzz about our fifth-best college basketball personality to follow on Twitter.

Jon Rothstein is very well-informed and has sources and connections out the wazoo, but he is a binge tweeter.

It's not an exaggeration to say that he has averaged close to 40 tweets per day over the past month, usually coming in large chunks. If you see him tweet "Greetings from (insert school's city)" or "Just hung up with (insert coach)," you better believe you're getting 10-12 observations or quotes in rapid succession.

There's nothing wrong with that. More so than most, he's doing a great job of amping people up for the coming season. But if you're like me and foolishly try to read through every tweet on your timeline, you might want to just set up a new account solely to follow Rothstein.

On the bright side, he's not even remotely a binge re-tweeter and rarely posts photos. He may tweet a ton, but at least he doesn't mistakenly believe his followers want to know the thoughts of everyone he's following or try to interchangeably use Twitter and Instagram. You people know who you are.

4. Eamonn Brennan

Twitter Handle: @eamonnbrennan

Tweets: 29,000

Followers: 28,000

If nothing else, you need to follow Eamonn Brennan because his account is basically used as an RSS feed for anything posted on ESPN's College Basketball Nation Blog. By following him, you're getting links to anything written/filmed by Brennan, Andy Katz, Myron Medcalf, C.J. Brown and Dana O'Neil.

In addition to that aggregation of information, Brennan is a great in-game tweeter. He has participated in a number of live blogs during conference tournaments and NCAA tournaments over the past few seasons, honing his craft of quickly and succinctly pointing out interesting tidbits in real time.

Brennan is also good at peppering in random observations. While others use their allotted non-basketball tweets to say something about their kids or meals, Brennan instead goes for neck pillows, Game of Thrones and video games.

3. Ken Pomeroy

USA TODAY Sports

Twitter Handle: @kenpomeroy

Tweets: 8,100

Followers: 53,000

Before I started following Ken Pomeroy on Twitter, I was expecting a boatload of tempo-free, percentage-based statistics, similar to the way the sabermetrics world of Major League Baseball tends to use its 140-character thoughts.

As a numbers nerd, it was an exciting proposition, and he definitely puts out a good number of those kinds of tweets. 

But when he isn't busy tweeting the results of his personal research and data-driven findings, the guy is actually really funny. For example, take this tweet about the CBI Finals, this one about the South Florida coaching vacancy or his take on Josh Richardson's coming-out party in the NCAA tournament.

Those are just the ones from late March. There are dozens more from the middle of the season if you care to go that far back in his timeline.

What's more is that Pomeroy talks about the small fries. Where the rest of the world spends the bulk of its time focusing on the nationally televised games between blue-blood schools, Pomeroy is making sure the world knows about guys like Alan Williams and pointing out how good (but unlucky) Utah was last season.

His log5 predictions aren't perfect (what prediction metric is?), but he projects winners of every conference tournament without acting like the minor conferences are inconsequential. He probably spent as much time tweeting about the America East tournament as he did the AAC tournament last year.

2. Seth Davis

USA TODAY Sports

Twitter Handle: @SethDavisHoops

Tweets: 32,000

Followers: 185,000

Some guys just do Twitter right.

Whereas Jay Bilas starts every day with a line from Young Jeezy, Seth Davis opens most every morning with an inspirational or funny quotation that would get even more retweets if it wasn't posted while 90 percent of America is still sleeping.

Beyond that, he actually interacts with his followers.

As a voter in the AP Top 25, Davis tweets out his full ballot every Sunday night, prefacing it with "time to feed the trolls." He then spends the next 15-30 minutes responding to replies, sometimes answering legitimate questions but mostly just making fun of people who tweet despite being painlessly incapable of cognitive thinking.

Then he does "20 for Tuesdays," when he spends about half an hour responding to 20 questions from college basketball fans who need answers.

If he's so good at Twitter, why isn't Davis at No. 1?

Enough with the life-in-a-cup tweets already.

1. Jeff Goodman

Twitter Handle: @GoodmanESPN

Tweets: 48,000

Followers: 126,000

Calling yourself a college basketball fan without following Jeff Goodman is roughly the equivalent of calling yourself an NFL fan without following Adam Schefter.

The man has more sources than most of us have Facebook friends.

Just two days ago, Goodman started out a tweet with "Multiple coaches texted me in the last 25 minutes." Technically, multiple could mean two, but considering how many of his tweets include "according to sources" or "a source told ESPN," I'm guessing he gets more than two texts from coaches every 25 minutes.

For breaking news about injuries, hirings, firings, transfers and recruits, you won't find anyone better than Goodman. While the rest of the world was obsessing over the NCAA tournament, he was already figuring out the coaching carousel and working on the list of transfers that grows and gets visited by yours truly on a nearly daily basis.

If you want snarky in-game commentary, go somewhere else. But if you want to stay up to date on all newsworthy things in college hoops, better follow Goodman.