Kenpom’s 2015-16 Preseason Rankings Released

Ken Pomeroy — or Kenpom as he and his website are more commonly known — came out with his preseason rankings for the 2015-16 season on Sunday night. While these rankings aren’t meant to be 100% accurate they do give a decent guideline and perspective on how teams compare within each conference and how the conferences compare to each other. Before I get into the rankings, here is an excerpt from Pomeroy’s blog post October of 2013 after he released the 2013-14 preseason rankings:

The system is largely the same as in recent seasons. It independently predicts a team’s adjusted offensive and defensive efficiency. As a reminder, it uses information split into two categories:

– Base level of the program. This takes into account the last five seasons of data for the same unit (offense for predicting offense) and the last season for the opposite unit (defense for predicting offense). It also includes data for how much money the program has spent on men’s basketball for the last three seasons. The bulk of this component is determined by the most recent season’s performance of the unit.

You can make a decent predictive system just by knowing what is normal for a program. If we were predicting the Big 12 standings in 2025 (assuming the conference exists), it would be reasonably safe to say that Kansas will have a winning record and TCU will have a losing record. We can say that with some confidence even though some of the players on those rosters haven’t picked up a basketball yet.

– Personnel. This component handles who’s coming back from last season’s team and which impact recruits are being added to the roster. More impact is given to returning players from earlier classes. And minutes played by those with a high-efficiency/high-usage profile are particularly important. Recruits in the RSCI top 100 have some influence here as well, although most of the influence is in the top 50.

The goal here is really to get each conference’s pecking order correct and to predict end-of-season ratings. To that extent, if a player is expected to be available by late-January or so, he’s included in the personnel calculations.

If you want to read his blog post about the 2015-16 preseason rankings, click here.

Now that you have some understanding what components go into Kenpom’s preseason rankings let’s get into some of the actual rankings.

Providence

• 2015-16 Preseason National Ranking: 62
• 2015-16 Preseason Big East Ranking: 6
• 2014-15 Final National Ranking: 30
• 2014-15 Final Big East Ranking: 4
• 2014-15 Final RPI: 0.6077

Providence’s preseason ratings aren’t quite as good for 2015-16 as they were for 2014-16 but that’s sort of in line with Providence’s roster reality. The Friars had much more known talent heading into last season, even with Kris Dunn’s ability to get back on track a bit of an unknown. Providence had LaDontae Henton, Tyler Harris and Carson Desrosiers returning as known commodities and all told had 41% of the points, 51% of the rebounds and 32% of the assists returning from the 2013-14 team that won the Big East Tournament. The 2015-16 Friars return rates for those 3 statistics are 44% of points, 40% of rebounds and 79% of assists.  While those numbers may look similar or even better in terms of assists there are a number of unknown commodities being counted on for Providence in 2015-16 and those unknowns don’t really do much for Kenpom’s preseason data.

Big East

• 2015-16 Preseason Conference Ranking: 5
• 2014-15 Final Conference Ranking: 3

The Big East is projected to finish 5th again this season after finishing the 2014-15 season ranked 3rd due mainly to the league’s strong non-conference record. The league has a number of good chances for quality non-conference wins again in 2015-16 so there is a chance for the league to move up in these rankings. The Big East — .7621 — trails the 4th-ranked Pac12 –.7653 — by just .0032 in the ratings. DePaul and St. John’s are the only two Big East teams outside the top-100 with 4 teams inside the top-50, including Villanova being ranked 5th overall.

• Villanova – 5th
• Georgetown – 27th
• Butler – 29th
• Xavier – 31st
• Marquette – 54th
• Providence – 62nd
• Seton Hall – 83rd
• Creighton – 86th
• DePaul – 113th
• St. John’s 150th

Notable Non-Conference Games

• Georgetown at Maryland 11/17/15
• Providence vs. Illinois 11/18/15
• Creighton at Indiana 11/19/15
• Marquette vs. Iowa 11/19/15
• DePaul vs. South Carolina 11/20/15 – neutral
• Georgetown vs. Wisconsin 11/20/15 – neutral
• Xavier at Michigan 11/20/15
• Marquette vs. LSU 11/23/15 – neutral
• St. John’s vs. Vanderbilt 11/23/15 – neutral
• Seton Hall vs. Georgia 11/28/15
• Butler at Cincinnati 12/2/15
• Seton Hall at George Washington 12/2/15
• Georgetown vs. Syracuse 12/5/15
• Providence at Rhode Island 12/5/15
• Villanova vs. Oklahoma 12/7 – neutral
• Marquette at Wisconsin – 12/12/15
• Xavier vs. Cincinnati 12/12/15
• St. John’s vs. Syracuse 12/13/15
• Butler vs. Purdue 12/19/15 – neutral
• Creighton at Oklahoma 12/19/15
• DePaul vs. Northwestern 12/19/15
• Seton Hall vs. Wichita State 12/19/15
• Villanova at Virginia 12/19/15
• DePaul vs. George Washington 12/22/15
• Xavier at Wake Forest 12/22/15

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Mike Hopkins

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