If you look at many of the early preseason top 25s for the 2024-2025 college basketball season, you won’t find Virginia in those rankings. It’s hard to argue that the Cavaliers should be ranked in the preseason at this point after barely making the NCAA Tournament last year only to get run off the floor in a play-in game. With many questions to answer following the departures of Reece Beekman, Ryan Dunn, and other key contributors, it makes sense that not many college basketball analysts are confident in the Hoos entering this season.
But for those hoping to see a little more optimism surrounding Tony Bennett’s squad this year, look no further than barttorvik.com, a college basketball analytics site similar to KenPom that has projections for the 2024-2025 season based on a number of statistical factors. One of the statistical categories on Bart Torvik is “Projected Effective Talent“, which seeks to measure the talent of each roster and how much of that talent will actually translate to on-court production. In that category, Bart Torvik has Virginia ranked as the fourth-most talented roster in all of college basketball for the 2024-2025 season. UVA scores an 81.3 in that category, highest in the ACC. The two-time reigning champion UConn is No. 1 and is followed by Illinois, Indiana, and then Virginia, who is followed closely by North Carolina and Duke.
The most talented teams in college basketball for 2024-25, via https://t.co/BisYiyTP7k 👀 pic.twitter.com/egvtl7Cjia
— College Basketball Report (@CBKReport) September 4, 2024
The above graphic was posted by College Basketball Report on Twitter on Wednesday and it aggregates the Bart Torvik projected effective talent rankings into a top 50. Naturally, the graphic picked up a lot of momentum on Twitter, with the noticeable absences of Alabama, Iowa State, and Auburn drawing a lot of criticism. It should be noted that CBK Report accidentally listed Texas A&M twice – at 17th and 35th. The Aggies are actually 17th in the rankings and the team at 35 is supposed to be Texas. Other than that, the graphic is an accurate depiction of the Bart Torvik rankings.
It should also be noted that these projected effective talent rankings are but one statistical measurement and are not reflective of Bart Torvik’s actual projections for how good these teams will be this season. Those predictions are displayed in Bart Torvik’s famed T-Rank projections, which, in addition to the other helpful “wins above bubble” metric, will be added this season to the team sheets that the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee will review when it comes time to select the NCAA Tournament field in March. That is to say, these are not pointless statistics, but actual data points that will be used to some extent to determine who’s in and who’s out and the seedings and matchups for March Madness in 2025.
The T-Rank is a complicated calculation that takes into account offensive and defensive efficiency and points scored and points allowed per possession and eventually spits out a number between 0 and 1 representing a team’s chance of winning against an average Division I team. It’s similar to KenPom’s rankings and will be used for the first time this year alongside KenPom as metrics to help inform the Selection Committee’s decisions.
These metrics will change and grow significantly more meaningful once games are actually played starting in November, but in Bart Torvik’s preseason projections, Virginia is ranked 64th with a 79.06% chance of beating the average DI team. UVA’s T-Rank is naturally dragged down by a mediocre expected adjusted offensive efficiency (acknowledging the program’s offensive struggles in recent years) as well as a low percentage of returning minutes/possessions on this year’s roster. Bart Torvik currently has the Hoos projected to go 17-13 and 10-10 in the ACC, which would be UVA’s worst season since Tony Bennett’s second year at Virginia.
So, if there is such strong evidence to suggest a “down year” and cynical expectations for the Cavaliers this season, then how can they be ranked so high in the talent category as to be considered, at least according to this metric, a top five most talented roster in college basketball?
While Virginia lost Reece Beekman and Ryan Dunn to the NBA as well as veteran front court pieces Jake Groves and Jordan Minor, the Cavaliers have on their roster seven former ESPN Top 100 recruits, most of any UVA team in the Tony Bennett era:
– Jalen Warley, No. 61 (2021)
– Isaac McKneely, No. 72 (2022)
– Blake Buchanan, No. 63 (2023)
– TJ Power, No. 32 (2023)
– Dai Dai Ames, No. 58 (2023)
– Elijah Gertrude, No. 99 (2023)
– Jacob Cofie, No. 59 (2024)
Elijah Gertrude, unfortunately, is expected to miss the entire 2024-2025 season after injuring his knee in a scooter accident. But it seems Bart Torvik is already taking that into account as Gertrude is not listed among Virginia’s Top 10 Projected Contributors for next season. Even without Gertrude, the Cavaliers have six former Top 100 recruits who are expected to play next year, plus Taine Murray, Andrew Rohde, and Elijah Saunders and a few X-factors/wild cards in redshirt freshmen Christian Bliss and Anthony Robinson, Vanderbilt transfer walk-on Carter Lang and true freshman sharpshooter Ishan Sharma. It does not require a big stretch of the imagination to see any of those names having a major impact for Virginia this season, though collectively, the group is severely lacking in experience.
So then the question becomes, which is better: untapped talent potential or the known commodity of experience? Fortunately, we’ve already pursued that very question in an article from a few weeks ago in which William Smythe looked at the data from the last 10 years of Virginia men’s basketball rosters to examine the correlation between returning experience and team success. You can read that story here: Virginia Basketball Roster Analysis: Balancing Youth vs. Experience
For what it’s worth, my view is that it seems most likely that Virginia being ranked 4th in terms of expected effective talent is at least slightly overrating this year’s roster. At the same time, I’d say a projection that ranks the Cavaliers 64th overall in the country and predicts them to go .500 in ACC play is drastically underrating both this roster and Tony Bennett’s proven track record of regular season success. Only time will tell.
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