Ceiling Rankings: Top Gear When It Really Matters

Highlighting the teams with high end players who drive results in tight games and show the highest ceilings under pressure.

As of December 10th, roughly a third of the college basketball season is behind us, and the early landscape is already revealing some surprises. What follows is a power ranking of sorts, focused on teams’ top performers in tight, competitive games—essentially, the players who carry the load when the stakes are highest. By isolating each team’s highest-usage players, we can highlight who could deliver in theory the best production under pressure and who carries the highest ceiling moving forward. Strength of schedule still plays a big role to this point in the season but these rankings also reflect which teams have been battle-tested, giving a clearer sense of who could thrive in NCAA-style competition when the rotations are drastically cut and it’s more heavily weighted with teams leaning on the top of the rotation. Take it for what it’s worth, but these are the teams popping right now and who might be a dangerous team in a tournament setting where the bench is used less.

*Tarris Reed hasn’t played enough for UConn at the time of this article or they would be top 10.