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Ranking Every NCAA Basketball Team

 Written by Dan Hanner & Luke Winn at SI.com
We forecast what we can and happily cede the rest to the players and the drama they improvise on the court. Sports Illustrated’s College Basketball Projection System, now in its third year, simulates the season 10,000 times and ranks teams 1–351 according to their average efficiency. Last year in the preseason, we identified North Carolina as a weak No. 1 in a historically wide-open field—and five months later, the Tar Heels led Villanova with 15 minutes left in the national title game. What transpired after that, culminating in Kris Jenkins’s buzzer-beating three, was the greatest finish in the history of the sport. You don’t get Jenkins’s dagger without the exhilarating crapshoot that is the single-elimination NCAA tournament, and you don’t get the nation’s most accurate preseason projections—as ours have been for the past two years—without running 10,000 simulations.

This project starts from the ground up, assessing every roster, player by player. For offense, the system projects efficiency and shot volume by considering past performance, recruiting rankings and advanced AAU stats, development curves for similar Division I players over the past 14 seasons, the quality of a player’s teammates and his coach’s ability to develop and maximize talent. Those stats are weighted based on the team’s rotation—including scouting intel on who’s expected to play—then used to produce each team’s offensive efficiency projection. (The simulations account for variance in individual performances as well as injury scenarios.) Team defensive efficiency projections are based on players’ projected rebound, steal and block percentages, height (taller frontcourts make for stingier D), experience (veterans have fewer lapses) and coaches’ defensive résumés. For a deeper look at how our model works, read this explainer, and for all of our analytics-driven preview content, click here.

This is how our system ranks all 351 teams heading into 2016­–17:

Rank Team Proj. Off. Eff. Off. Rank Proj. Def. Eff. Def. Rank Proj. Pyth. Win% Proj. Conf. Rank Proj. NCAAs seed
1 Duke 125.2 1 94.0 11 0.9641 1st in ACC 1 seed
2 Kansas 118.6 8 91.5 3 0.9519 1st in B12 1 seed
3 Kentucky 119.2 7 92.0 4 0.9515 1st in SEC 1 seed
4 Oregon 120.1 4 93.9 9 0.9447 1st in P12 1 seed
5 Villanova 120.2 3 94.2 13 0.9431 1st in BE 2 seed

While our projections saw no dominant teams in the 2015–16 preseason, this year they view Duke as a juggernaut, ranking first in offensive efficiency by a wide margin and 11th in defense. We went back and examined every preseason No. 1 from the past decade—using beginning-of-season rosters to project performance—to see how these Blue Devils stacked up, and starting with the ‘07–08 preseason, only one team had a stronger projection. That was ‘08–09 North Carolina, which came into that season with a veteran, national player of the year candidate in power forward Tyler Hansbrough; a supporting cast of efficient sidekicks in guards Ty Lawson, Wayne Ellington and Danny Green; and two elite freshmen big men in Ed Davis and Tyler Zeller.

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