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Poll Position
Pre-season polls as a tourney indicator? Hey, it adds up.
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That Danny Green and Carolina was pre-season No. 1 still means something. Mostly, that they're loaded with talent.
In 2002, Gonzaga recorded their best regular season in school history: the team was 29-3, ranked No. 4 in the AP poll. Yet, when the tourney seeds came out, Gonzaga was a 6-seed. Did the ranking not matter?
A week later, Gonzaga went out and lost to 11-seeded Wyoming in the first round.
The Zags hadn't been pre-season ranked, and Mark Few and the program learned a lesson: climbing the polls off cupcakes is easy, but RPI matters more. Since then, the Zags have routinely played a brutal non-conference slate to boost their RPI.
Pre-season polls tend to be dismissed by everybody from the coaches whose teams hold lofty ones early on, to the broadcasters calling November games—it makes sense, since even the current polls are deemed meaningless the moment the selection committee calls out your seed.
In reality, pre-season rankings tend to say plenty going into the tournament. Consider the last five years:
• In 2004, UConn was pre-season ranked No. 1 overall, and cruised to a tourney win.
• In 2005, North Carolina was a pre-season No. 3 ranked team with votes for No. 1, and won the title.
• In 2006, Florida was unranked going into the season, but we didn't yet know about Al Horford, Joakim Noah and company. They started 16-0, were safely top ten by mid-season, and won out in March.
• Florida started No. 1 overall, and ended that way.
• Last year, Kansas entered the season at No. 4 overall with votes for No. 1, and finished the Final Four as champs, after defeating pre-season No. 1 North Carolina in the semis.
Aside from the Florida breakthrough in 2006, the trend largely holds going back further, with a couple exceptions. That's probably because the polls, if anything, are highly indicative of returning talent. And in an NCAA Tournament pool that year after year is also notable for the players that have taken off early to join the NBA, veteran talent is a safe bet. That said, the breakthroughs of the last ten years are Syracuse winning in 2003, and Florida's breakthrough, discussed above. In one case, Carmelo Anthony could have been in the NBA and instead drove the Orange to a title, and in the other, the Gators had a class with four future draft picks emerge all at once. Last year we had a brush, when Derrick Rose carried Memphis to the brink. In that case, Memphis looks like a possible trend-buster this year with Tyreke Evans pushing the Tigers into the poll picture.
Still, based on the fact that the champion often comes from the pre-season top 5, this year looks to be no different. Cinderellas are built for the Sweet Sixteen, but aside from pesky George Mason or the '85 Villanova squad, they generally don't belong in the Final Four.
Seven of the 10 teams that started the season in the top ten remain there. Louisville has risen to No. 1, but it's hardly a leap from a pre-season pick of No. 3; North Carolina has fallen to No. 3, two spots lower than their pre-season spot, but seeing as Ty Lawson has been resting, there's cause for that drop; Pittsburgh, Duke, UConn and Michigan State have all stayed steady, and Gonzaga, picked at No. 10 in the pre-season, holds that spot today. Memphis and Oklahoma are a little ahead of their initial projections, partially because freshman Evans and Willie Warren turned in stellar efforts.
Only Missouri was a real gate-crasher. They came into the season unranked, and now sit at No. 9.
The bottom line, however, if you look at the recent history of the rankings—a period in which the RPI continues to mean more than ever—pre-season prognostications still mean a lot.
And if you have money on Louisville, North Carolina, UConn, Pitt or Duke, you should feel good today.
Those are the teams we liked all along, and that, believe it or not, means plenty.
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