NCAA Basketball: Highlights, surprises from 2019-20 preseason KenPom rankings

A new year, a new batch of KenPom rankings for the upcoming NCAA Basketball season. What should we make of it?

It’s that time of year! Sunday marked the release of Ken Pomeroy’s preseason rankings, which means that we are inching closer and closer to tipping off the 2019-20 campaign. Considered the preeminent advanced analytics source for NCAA Basketball, the KenPom ranks will be cited by nearly every pundit and prognosticator around the country throughout the year.

As a reminder — or an introduction for the uninitiated — the KenPom ratings are an adjusted measurement of a team’s offensive and defensive efficiency. These numbers are reached by calculating points per 100 possessions and then tweaking those figures to adjust for strength of schedule, game location, and other factors. For a full rundown of Pomeroy’s methodology, head over to his website. (Note: while the 1-353 rankings are provided free of charge, a wealth of team- and player-specific information sits behind a very reasonable paywall.)

KenPom certainly isn’t the only resource out there for advanced analytics, but it is the most well-known. These figures and the NCAA’s NET rankings represent two of the six models that the Selection Committee uses to help compare and contrast résumés when filling out the Field of 68. The other models are ESPN’s Basketball Power Index and Strength of Record, Jeff Sagarin’s ratings, and Kevin Pauga’s KPI. Other analytics systems, such as Bart Torvik’s T-Rank and Erik Haslam’s Haslametrics, are not officially used by the NCAA, but are well-respected in the field and are regularly cited by analysts.

So far, of the “official” models, only KenPom has come out with preseason rankings. These early marks are certainly volatile, as they rely on conjectures about returning players’ progression/regression, as well the imperfect science of trying to quantify how new players will perform. These forecasts come together to allow for predictions of every game and, voila!

As the season progresses, the projected numbers give way to the actual results for each team. By the time conference play rolls around, most of the influence of the preseason projections has worked itself out of the system. But for now, these rankings give some ideas about which teams to watch out for.

But parsing through this thick table of numbers on your own can be somewhat prohibitive if you aren’t used to it, so here’s a look at some of the highlights and surprises from these early initial rankings. Let’s start with a look at the Top 10 teams.