The Most Important Fake Top-25 College Basketball Rankings On The Internet

So every Monday I’ll be putting these together. But, what I want to do each week, besides rack up hopeful pageviews by people getting mad about where their team is, is address some of the biggest questions of the previous week. Now, the way I plan on doing these rankings is a combo of looking forward and looking behind. So take some of the results that we’ve seen, but also try to predict who will be the best teams going forward. It’s not going to be strictly results based, especially early on in the season when there are just a couple of games.

1. Duke
2. Kansas
3. Gonzaga
4. Virginia
5. Michigan
6. Kentucky
7. Nevada
8. UNC
9. Tennessee
10. Auburn
11. Virginia Tech
12. Kansas State
13. Florida State
14. Michigan State
15. LSU
16. Mississippi State
17. Ohio State
18. UCLA
19. NC State
20. Nebraska
21. Buffalo
22. Indiana
23. Clemson
24. Iowa
25. Butler

So the story this week is obviously Villanova falling out of the rankings. Do I think they’ll be fine? Yes. But, there are enough results to justify leaving them out of the top-25 right now. If they would have beat Furman (who was considered for the top-25 with road wins over Loyola and Nova), I’d probably leave Villanova in the top-25 just because I expect them to figure it out and I believe they are one of the 25 best teams in the country. This sort of has an Arizona feel from last year when Arizona lost in Atlantis and fell out of the rankings despite most people thinking they were still a top-25 team.

After that the big story is the Big 10. There’s no doubt the conference has been down the last couple of years and this year is the best start in quite some time for the Midwest + Maryland and Rutgers. You have to start with Michigan. I moved them up to No. 5 in the rankings and feel that’s probably where they’ll end up in the AP. They dominated Nova on the road. Then picked up a neutral court win over Providence. Their defense is arguably the best in the country and that’s just downright scary considering what Beilein does offensively. Then there’s Ohio State, who already has road wins against Cincinnati and Creighton. Iowa won the 2k with wins over Oregon and UConn. Even a team like Wisconsin I debated at No. 25 with the road win against Xavier on the resume. Just an impressive start for the conference. I’m keeping Indiana in the top-25 despite the loss at Arkansas because it was a road loss and the way it happened.

This week will obviously change a lot with the tournaments. So while this is the top-25 as of Sunday night, there’s 0 chance it stays close to this in a week.

Scheduled Top-25 Matchups
I expect more here, but these are just ones that are for sure happening:
No. 14 Michigan State vs No. 18 UCLA – Thursday 10pm