It’s been a long time. I shouldn’t have left you. Without some dope rankings to step to.
Sorry for being slack on updating these rankings. Crappy weather in North Carolina, coupled with yesterday being the anniversary of leaving my mother’s womb, has left me less interested in doing any writing. But today is a new day. And that new day brings a new #1 team to the EPW rankings.
Fresh off last night’s victory in Pittsburgh, the Syracuse Orange are now the projected #1 team at the end of the regular season. Not that this development is terribly shocking. Being undefeated tends to correlate strongly with being highly ranked. But Syracuse had not been able to jump ahead of Arizona based on their weaker schedule. Oddly enough, the schedule strength is much closed than I expected. The to-date SOS for ‘Cuse is .787, with Arizona sitting at .777. That margin shrinks in the end of season numbers.
The most interesting thing I have noticed in the last week is that the rankings have normalized a bit. There hasn’t been a ton of movement since my last update. Saint Louis had the biggest jump of the Top 25 teams, climbing 6 spots to #11. Bracket Matrix has Saint Louis slotted at #17. The real results will look more like Bracket Matrix, if I had to guess, as the public perception doesn’t seem to be matching the actual results. Maybe that will change if they pick up a win at VCU on March 1, but I think it’s a much more likely scenario that the Billikens will be underseeded come tourney time.
