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When it comes to college basketball do you follow the ranking system? If you do follow the ranking charts that are out there which one do you follow? Are you aware of how many national ranking lists there are for the NCAA? Let’s do a quick review of our choices and for those of you that don’t know how many ranking systems there are for the NCAA there are lots of them depending on how many sports websites you want to go to. We will look at the top 3 for the moment.
The first system is the AP Top 25 which is the Associated Presses Poll of the top NCAA teams in the nation. The votes come from a pool of sports writers from all over the nation who after each week list their top 25 teams in the nation. The number one team receives 25 points for a first place vote 24 points for the second place team and all the way down to 1 point for the 25th team.
For the most par this AP Top 25 usually follows pretty close to the second poll system which is the coaches poll. The coaches poll works similarly to the AP poll only you guessed it, the coaches due the voting. Specifically 31 coaches from Division I NCAA teams are given the chance to vote again from 1 to 25 with a point system again. The coaches poll and the AP poll usually run pretty close in terms of how the teams are ranked.
The last poll called the RPI or ratings percentage index is basically a mathematical equation that is applied to the teams winning % their opponents winning % and then finally the winning % of the opponents of those opponents. Wow did you get all that? Basically it’s your winning % and strength of the schedule of you and your opponents. This system of polling teams needless to say can have quite a different outcome than that of the human polls. For example just this past weeks polls. Wake Forest is ranked as number 2 in the AP poll and number 3 in the coaches poll not a big difference so no big deal. Where is Wake Forest in the RPI poll? They are listed all the way down at number 14! Wow that is a huge drop in the rankings from one poll to the others.
So again I will ask which poll do you think holds the most value when it comes to ranking teams? Do we really need to have all these polls? Thankfully the NCAA has figured out how to do a playoff system and we have March Madness to settle any ranking disputes. For the most part, no system is perfect. At least it’s not the mess we have in NCAA football where it’s just about the polls and there is no playoff system.
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