For nearly 75 years, the Associated Press has helped spark intriguing storylines to follow throughout the men’s college basketball season with its weekly rankings of the top teams in the country.
Though it doesn’t have any bearing on the postseason, the AP Top 25 poll has played a role throughout the months leading up to the NCAA Tournament when it comes to creating high-profile matchups for TV and discourse for fans to rant about on Monday mornings when they see where their team stacks up in comparison to the rest of the nation.
As the sport has expanded — and technology has improved — computer rankings have become much more relevant. Using intricate algorithms and unique formulas, websites like KenPom, Bart Torvik, Haslametrics and EvanMiya have created their own methodologies to rank not only the top 25 teams on a weekly basis, but all 364 Division-I programs on the daily.
The NCAA even has its own ranking system called the NET, which along with some of the aforementioned websites, is used by the NCAA Tournament selection committee when it puts together the 68-team field on Selection Sunday.
COMPUTER RANKINGS HAVE COME A LONG WAY
Computer rankings have been subject to the same level of scrutiny as the human polls, though they’ve certainly become more widely accepted in college basketball circles. Then every season around early December, the Week 6 version of the AP poll comes out. The past 20 national champions were each ranked in the top 12 in their respective season’s Week 6 AP poll.
The college basketball world was reminded of that oddly specific factoid on Monday, when the AP released its sixth poll of the 2024-25 regular season. But it wasn’t the only noticeable takeaway from the updated top 25 list — because like in previous weeks, there were some voters who made some interesting choices on their ballots.
Kentucky, fresh off a thrilling come-from-behind overtime victory over Gonzaga in Seattle, ended up dropping one spot to No. 5 — coincidentally behind No. 4 Duke, which suffered a 77-72 loss to the Wildcats in the Champions Classic on Nov. 12. Since then the Blue Devils dropped another game to Kansas and picked up a big win at home over No. 2 Auburn, while Kentucky stumbled once against Clemson on the road in a hostile environment before bouncing back to top the Bulldogs.
Head-to-head records aren’t the end-all, be-all in the AP poll, and probably for good reason; otherwise No. 16 Clemson would have a case to be ranked above Kentucky. But to the imperfect human eye that’s trying to make sense of a topsy-turvy college basketball season, head-to-head does matter to a certain degree. We all saw what happened that Tuesday night in Atlanta between Duke and Kentucky, yet for some reason not everyone is on the same page about it.
The NET, KenPom and Torvik all have the Blue Devils ahead of the Wildcats in their respective rankings just like the AP does. Not every website out there that uses a projection-based model to order all 364 teams is going to be perfect. However, when the computer seemingly disregards head-to-head, we understand it’s processing other advanced metrics using different formulas, thus creating a hierarchy based on those baked-in concepts. With humans, it’s not as easy as getting everyone on the same page.
UConn, for example, lost three consecutive games to unranked opponents at the Maui Invitational, yet somehow remained inside the AP’s top 25 in the Week 5 edition of the poll. In fact, one voter still had the Huskies in the top 10. Obviously, mistakes happen sometimes and judging a person’s ballot based on one ranking alone isn’t fair. But there’s no justifying that decision after what happened against Memphis, Colorado and Dayton.
HUMAN BIAS CONTINUES TO CREEP IN
No. 12 Oregon was one of the few ranked teams that didn’t budge either way from where it sat in last week’s poll— despite the fact the Ducks lost at home, 73-71, to UCLA less than 24 hours prior to the updated poll that dropped on Monday. A 2-point loss to a really good Bruins squad on a go-ahead, banked in 3-pointer with less than a second left isn’t a terrible loss, but it looks really odd when the team that lost wasn’t penalized for the result. Meanwhile, the team that came out victorious was propped up for winning the game. Oh yes, UCLA is in the top 25 now at No. 24.
To be clear, I believe the Bruins might even be better than what their AP ranking indicates. It’s how the results of these games are being weighed based upon people’s preconceived notions of how certain teams were “supposed” to look back in the fall that can get out of hand when we — humans who can’t control our biases — try to rank a bunch of teams at once.
To UConn’s credit, the Huskies rebounded with back-to-back wins over Baylor and Texas. Still, it’s fair to say their No. 2 ranking heading to Hawaii was based in large part on their accomplishments as the back-to-back national champions — and not because of their nonconference wins over Sacred Heart, New Hampshire and Le Moyne.
Understandably, UConn deserved the respect that comes with being the reigning national champion. What reality has told us so far this season, however, is something different.
Over at Barttorvik.com, where you can remove preseason biases, the Huskies sit at No. 28 in the country, 11 spots behind their AP ranking (No. 17) and one behind Saint Mary’s at No. 27. When the NET Rankings were made public for the first time this season on Dec. 2, UConn was No. 39. The Ducks are No. 29 in Torvik and No. 21 at KenPom.com, which even factors in preseason rankings and past successes.
What websites like Torvik haven’t done, however, is generate buzz and excitement among casual fans like the AP poll can. The little number that appears next to a team’s name on TV isn’t its KenPom ranking. Maybe it’s time that it should be.
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