In Reply to: KenPom's preseason rankings posted by mh on October 13, 2025 at 09:45:04
than you think they do. This is from his Substack email (edited to eliminate references to charts not displayed here, and for continuity).
Preseason ratings are here. We're so back.
Ken Pomeroy
Oct 13
My preseason ratings were released Sunday, and as always, they suck...
But first we have to talk about last season’s preseason ratings which sucked less than ever before. And what do you do after a performance like that? Well, you gloat. Because it's probably not going to happen again...
How well did the preseason ratings correlate to the final ratings? ...the preseason ratings were never better than last season by that measure. ...the evolution of minutes continuity since 2012... continues to crash, showing how much more rosters are changing in recent seasons. And yet, the preseason ratings were as good as ever in that environment.
The top three teams in the preseason ratings - Houston, Duke, and Auburn - all made the Final Four and not in some sort of fluke. They were safe one-seeds on Selection Sunday. This will never happen again. None of the three teams spent a single day outside of the top five in my ratings over the course of the season (and just a combined 21 days outside my top four), while Houston fell as low as 17th(?!) in the AP poll, Duke was 12th at one point, and Auburn started 11th.
On top of that, all three were outliers in my ratings relative to the preseason AP poll. Duke and Auburn weren’t ranked by any AP voter as high as they were in my ratings. And preseason #1 Houston was ranked #1 by just 4 AP voters.
Typically, outliers have been about a 50/50 proposition to buck consensus, where we define consensus as the range produced by AP voters. But last season had more positives than negatives.
On the good side of the ledger:
Duke (kp #2; no higher than #3 by any AP voter, finished #1)
Auburn (kp #3; no higher than #5 by any AP voter, finished #4)
Kansas (kp #7; no lower than #5 by any AP voter, finished #24)
Indiana (kp #39; just 2 voters did not rank them, finished #45)
Honorable mention:
Texas Tech (kp #14; no higher than #14 by any AP voter, finished #9)
North Carolina (kp #15; no lower than #15 by any AP voter, finished #31)
On the bad side:
Villanova (kp #20; did not receive an AP vote and nobody even thought about voting for them, finished #56)
Kentucky (kp #43; did not receive votes from 20 voters, but we can assume nobody would have had them as low as #43, finished #16)
Based on the freshly released AP poll, this year’s outliers are:
St. John’s (kp #16; but no lower than #14 by any AP voter)
Baylor (kp #17; actually got a vote for 25th in the AP poll which surprised me)
Vanderbilt (kp #19; no higher than #22 by any AP voter)
Arkansas (kp #29; only one AP voter didn’t rank them)
Auburn? (kp #31; just four AP voters didn’t rank them)
Honorable mention:
Tennessee (kp #9; just 2 AP voters have them as high as #9)