Ella Aikens ‘23, Business and Ad Manager
The 2022-2023 college basketball has started up, which means the team rankings are changing weekly. Choosing which team is in the top 25 takes into consideration more components than just their winning percentage. It includes game results, strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin, net offensive and defensive efficiency, and the quality of wins and losses. Many believe that the beginning of the season rankings do not really matter since these rankings come from each team that finished last season, and do not account for the NCAA tournament and this year’s new recruits. A team may have gotten high recruits coming out of high school playing for them, but they do not always turn out to be as good as they were in high school.
Basketball is a team sport but also an industrial sport. The team aspect of it comes with making plays and passing the ball around to each other, while the industrial sport aspect of it is making your shots and not fouling. If two best players are not making their shots it does not help the team so the other players need to step up. A lot of the new players for a team might not be as good out of high school as they need more development and practice because college is a new kind of game in basketball. So going back to the AP rankings, just because teams have high recruits does not mean the team is gonna be good at the end of the season.
A lot of the teams that are ranked in the top 10 tend to fall early in the season despite the expectation that they are the best in the country. Many of the top teams this season have had some tough losses, including Kentucky who lost to Michigan State, UNC who lost to Alabama, and many more underdog teams who caused huge upsets.
The unexpected always comes early in the season where teams that have not too many people had high hopes of having a winning season, come up big and prove most fans wrong. Most shockingly this season is Houston University, who is ranked number one in the NCAA at the end of week four.
Following the regular season, March Madness is the only place where the rankings matter, and there is always a low ranked team that makes a huge run towards the championship. Even still, the rankings should not matter, due to the fact that teams play game by game, a team might have an off game and the other team has a good game the team that had a bad game will be out of the running and the teams season will be ended.
No matter if one’s basketball team is ranked number one in the nation or number 23, each team will have a chance of winning the NCAA tournament and stunning the nation.
Lyon Life 