NCAA Basketball: 5 biggest winners from 2021-22 preseason KenPom rankings
ACC
While each high-major conference saw a handful of teams rise in the rankings – some, for the most part, dramatically – no power league likely benefitted as much from the preseason KenPom ratings than the Atlantic Coast Conference, which saw just two teams – Florida State and Virginia – ranked within the top 30 at the end of 2020-21, and had five teams checking in with marks worse than 80 – Notre Dame (85th), Pittsburgh (97th), Miami (138th), Boston College (148th), and Wake Forest (175th).
That is obviously not great for a conference as historically successful as the ACC, and the league has now struggled for two-straight seasons to have more than three teams ranked within the top 30. Unfortunately for the ACC, the preseason KenPom ratings do not favor the conference either – just Duke and Florida State rank among the top 30, which is mightily woeful compared to the whopping six ACC teams in that same range at the end of the 2018-19 campaign.
Where the ACC is victorious, however, is the improvement that nine teams made from the end of last year to this year. Although six teams – Clemson, Georgia Tech, Virginia, Pittsburgh, North Carolina, and Florida State – all dropped, a handful of programs saw dramatic jumps up the ranking. Among them are Wake Forest (who saw the ninth-biggest incline of any Div. I team from 175th to 104th), Miami (who cracked into the top 100), and Notre Dame.
Arguably, the Fighting Irish may be the biggest winners of any ACC team, after finishing a woeful 11-15 last season and ending the year ranked 85th after a 42-point blowout loss to North Carolina in the ACC Tournament. A 58-spot increase has Notre Dame slotted at 27th, the Irish’s highest ranking since the 2017-18 season when Mike Brey’s program went 21-15.
The other noteworthy team is Duke, who – in Mike Krzyzewski’s final season and with star freshman Paolo Banchero headlining the Blue Devils’ star-power – catapulted from 36th (where they finished as the third-highest ranked team to miss out on the NCAA Tournament, below an Arizona team that had planted a self-imposed postseason ban and a Memphis squad that won the NIT) to 10th.
High preseason rankings obviously do not mean much for the Blue Devils, considering they started last season in second – but this is decidedly optimistic for a program that uncharacteristically struggled in 2020-21.
This is all without mentioning Virginia Tech, N.C. State, and Louisville – all of whom saw double-digit improvements – as well as Boston College and Syracuse, with both earning minimal upswings – but upswings nonetheless. While the ACC still may not be as strong as it was three years ago, expectations are decidedly higher for some programs that have not been as strong in recent years – and that bodes well for the conference moving forward.