:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/31342561/483307655.0.jpg)
The conclusion of the 2013-2014 college basketball season brings about one thing immediately: speculation as to who'll be the best teams of the 2014-2015 season. One of the biggest problems with these articles is that while it can be easy to ascertain who might be the top 3-5 teams might be, figuring out the teams around 5-15 and 16-25 is a bit harder.
What I've done is combine the preseason 2014-2015 rankings from 9 different articles. They are:
Brendan Prunty, The Star-Ledger
C.J. Moore & Jason King, Bleacher Report
Rob Dauster, College Basketball Talk
I assigned point values to each team's ranking, with a #1 ranking earning a team 25 points, and a #25 ranking earning a team 1 point. I then averaged the point values and sorted the teams by the averaged point values to find the consensus top teams. This methodology does have some flaws - I could only find nine preseason rankings, and while I played with adding teams that writers listed as outside the Top 25, not all writers listed teams as being just outside the Top 25, so I erred on the side of consistency. Without further ado, the top 39 teams listed by the aforementioned writers:
| Rank | Team | Average |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Arizona | 23.9 |
| 2 | Duke | 23.8 |
| 3 | Wisconsin | 23.2 |
| 4 | Kansas | 21.6 |
| 5 | North Carolina | 19.8 |
| 6 | Kentucky | 19.3 |
| 7 | Virginia | 16.9 |
| 8 | Florida | 15.1 |
| 9 | SMU | 13.8 |
| 10 | Villanova | 13.7 |
| 11 | Texas | 13.0 |
| T12 | Wichita State | 12.6 |
| T12 | Connecticut | 12.6 |
| 14 | Michigan | 12.0 |
| 15 | Louisville | 8.9 |
| 16 | Gonzaga | 6.9 |
| T17 | Iowa State | 6.8 |
| T17 | Oklahoma | 6.8 |
| T19 | VCU | 5.7 |
| T19 | San Diego State | 5.7 |
| 21 | Ohio State | 5.3 |
| 22 | Michigan State | 5.1 |
| 23 | Oregon | 5.0 |
| 24 | Nebraska | 4.0 |
| 25 | Colorado | 3.6 |
| 26 | UCLA | 3.2 |
| 27 | Stanford | 3.0 |
| 28 | Harvard | 2.7 |
| T29 | Iowa | 2.2 |
| T29 | Baylor | 2.2 |
| T29 | Maryland | 2.2 |
| 32 | Syracuse | 1.9 |
| 33 | UNLV | 1.4 |
| 34 | Kansas State | 1.3 |
| T35 | West Virginia | 1.0 |
| T35 | Utah | 1.0 |
| 37 | Pittsburgh | 0.8 |
| 38 | Minnesota | 0.4 |
| 39 | BYU | 0.3 |
A few notes:
- On Michigan State - They're the fourth ranked Big Ten team in this poll behind Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio State, with Nebraska on the Spartans' heels. However, MSU was one of only 15 teams to receive a vote in the top 25 from every writer. Whether that means people think MSU can maintain a semblance of strength or whether the Spartans were added lazily to the end of each poll to fill it out (Michigan State was 25th, 24th, or 23rd in 5 of the 9 articles) remains to be seen.
- There is a big three - It's Arizona, Duke, and Wisconsin. Arizona will get everyone back except Aaron Gordon, Duke is Duke, and the Badgers are only losing Ben Brust.
- People are high on SMU. How much of that is the Larry Brown effect remains to be seen.