2014-15 Kenpom Preseason Rankings Released

Ken Pomeroy, or Kenpom as he and his website are more commonly known, came out with his preseason rankings for the 2014-15 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 last October 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 2014-15 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. (Note: all projections with an * were done by me using Kenpom’s numbers)

Providence

• 2014-15 Preseason National Ranking: 53
• 2014-15 Preseason Big East Ranking: 5
• 2014-15 Preseason RPI Projection*: 0.5874
• 2013-14 Final National Ranking: 51
• 2013-14 Final Big East Ranking: 3
• 2013-14 Final RPI: 0.5873

Kenpom’s preseason numbers look very similar to where the Friars finished after the 2013-14 season. The RPI of 0.5873 from last season was good for 40th and would likely be in that range again if the Friars indeed finished at the projected 0.5874. For me, the Kenpom numbers confirm what I had been thinking about the 2014-15 Friar team: they will be good. The difference between finishing 5th and 3rd in the Big East was razor thin in the inaugural season last year and I expect that will be the case again with a mess of teams jostling for spots behind heavy favorite Villanova. Providence’s projected overall strength of schedule*, .5670, would likely put their SOS in the mid-30’s. As for their non-conference SOS*, that number is projected at .5570 which would likely be good for somewhere in the 40’s. For purposes of comparison, last season’s non-conference SOS was .4943 which was good for 195th.

Big East

• 2014-15 Preseason Conference Ranking: 5
• 2013-14 Final Conference Ranking: 5

The Big East is projected to finish 5th again by Kenpom but their projected 2014-15 rating of .7509 is better than the .7370 rating they finished the 2013-14 season with. The conference should have a better non-conference strength of schedule this season which should help when it’s time for the NCAA Selection Committee to make decisions on who is in and who is out. For the Big East to maintain it’s status as a basketball power conference the league will need to start getting at least 4 teams into the NCAA Tournament each year and have 1 or 2 of those teams go on deep runs. Every single member of the Big East is inside the top 100 of Kenpom’s preseason rankings except DePaul holding down the basement at 197. Villanova being ranked 9th represents the lone Big East school in the top 10 with the only other school to crack the top 25 being Georgetown at 22. The rest of the schools are ranked as follows: St. John’s 39, Creighton 47, Providence 53, Xavier 66, Butler 67, Seton Hall 85, Marquette 86.

Notable Non-Conference games:

• Marquette at Ohio State 11/18/14
• Creighton vs. Oklahoma 11/19/14
• Providence vs. Florida State neutral site 11/22/14
• Providence vs. Notre Dame neutral site 11/23/14
• Villanova vs. VCU neutral site 11/24/14
• Butler vs. North Carolina neutral site 11/26/14
• Georgetown vs. Florida neutral site 11/26/14
• St. John’s vs. Minnesota 11/26/14
• DePaul vs. Stanford 11/30/14
• Providence at Kentucky 11/30/14
• Creighton at Tulsa 12/3/14
• Marquette vs. Wisconsin 12/6/14
• St. John’s vs. Syracuse 12/6/14
• Xavier vs. Alabama 12/6/14
• Creighton at Nebraska 12/7/14
• Seton Hall at Wichita State 12/9/14
• Villanova vs. Illinois neutral site 12/9/14
• Georgetown vs. Kansas 12/10/14
• Butler at. Tennessee 12/14/14
• Butler vs. Indiana neutral site 12/20/14
• Villanova vs. Syracuse 12/20/14
• Seton Hall at Georgia 12/21/14
• DePaul vs. Colorado neutral site 12/22/14
• Providence vs. Miami (FL) neutral site 12/22/14
• Georgetown vs. Indiana neutral site 12/27/14
• St. John’s vs. Duke 1/25/15
• Xavier at Cincinnati 2/18/15

Summary

For the Big East, it appears that all of the members have upgraded their non-conference schedules and in order to take the next step as a conference and regain some national respect some of these tough non-conference matchups needs to end up as wins. The conference barely got 4 teams into the NCAA Tournament last season as Providence was not going to make it without getting the automatic bid from winning the Big East Tournament. That can’t be the norm for this league going forward. There needs to be 4 teams in with another 1 or 2 on the bubble each season, resulting in NIT bids, for this conference to get any respect in the post-realignment era of college basketball.

For Providence, this will be the beginning of a new future for Ed Cooley’s program. With Bryce Cotton and Kadeem Batts gone, this roster now is almost totally filled with Cooley recruits with the lone exception being graduate student Ted Bancroft. Most fans would agree that winning the Big East Tournament last season was ahead of schedule for Cooley’s rebuild job after the tear down he was left with from Keno Davis’ time in Friartown. Cooley has built the program “brick by brick” as he stated he would do during his introductory press conference and with a solid foundation and a little taste of winning in place, this could be the season that jumpstarts a run of success in Providence not seen in a long time.

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Mike Hopkins

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