A Comparison: Preseason & Post Season Polls

We published our Top 25 rankings June 9th and our top 50 before July. Prior to the season beginning, we compared those rankings to the preseason AP Poll.

For this exercise, we’ll need to use the Coaches Poll since they are the only poll with a post-tournament Top 25 of the two polls. Let’s first take a look at the Coach’s Preseason poll vs ours. (I’ve included others receiving votes in the rankings as well).

Here are the post-tournament Coaches Poll rankings. I’ve included KenPom as well who doesn’t do a preseason poll for another opinion. Most of the general public isn’t aware of the various computer rankings, but they do know and cite the AP and Coaches Poll regularly which is why we are going to use their final poll.

Fairleigh Dickinson getting a vote is pretty ridiculous. It was a nice upset but that is exactly why some people tend to write these polls off. Hopefully studying what we were wrong and what to look for on our end will help us become more accurate in future rankings. Here is the comparison to how the AP, Coaches, and TRN looked in the preseason vs postseason.

As you can see there were misses by everyone. We were closer among the top 10 with Miami being the big divergence. Creighton and Purdue were our bigger misses by comparison. That’s despite picking Zach Edey as the best player in college basketball in the preseason. I just didn’t see anything around him from a team perspective. He averaged essentially the same amount of points and rebounds as we projected if he played that many minutes. Creighton I was skeptical would improve as much as they did even return most of the same team that was only 50th last season in the final KenPom. They did however more inline with most consensus thinking. Don’t doubt Tom Izzo and Randy Bennett no matter if it looks like a rebuilding season. They do not rebuild apparently, ever. That is the other biggest take away.