2024 Team Preseason Projections

Diving into some notable team rankings and projections methodology changes

Preseason team and player rankings are live at EvanMiya.com, and the college basketball season is less than a month away!

Here’s a preview of the top 10 teams and players on the site:

Quick Methodology Overview

For those who aren’t familiar, here’s an overview of how the team preseason projections are formulated:

• Projected roster strength - This is by far the most important one. Each player on the roster has a projected Bayesian Performance Rating for the season, which estimates how impactful a player will be on a per-possession basis during the season. There is also an associated minutes prediction model that gives a rough estimate of what a team’s rotation will look like. Combining all rostered players’ projected BPR with predicted minutes gets an estimate of the team’s overall roster strength based on personnel. You can see each team's “Roster Rank” column on the Team Ratings page. The top 10 teams in roster strength are also shown below:

• Team performance in previous seasons - Though this is much less of a factor in a team’s preseason projection, it still does play an important role. Teams that often outperform their projected roster strength in past seasons are likelier to do so in future seasons. I did make a change this offseason to treat teams with new head coaches separately from teams with returning coaches. Based on my analysis, when a team changes coaches, their next season performance correlates very little with how they fared in the previous season. Roster strength is crucially important in these cases.

• Roster continuity - Teams with a higher percentage of returning minutes from the previous season are often slightly better than teams with a lot of roster turnover. This doesn’t play a huge role, but it does move the team projection slightly. I also added an estimate of each team’s percentage of minutes that will be played by returning players since my previous study on roster construction shows that teams who build their rotation more around returning players are more successful than teams with lots of newcomers, even with comparable roster strength.

Top 30 Teams

Let’s look at the top 30 preseason teams without further ado.

Powerhouse Houston is at #1 due to its very strong returning group (preseason roster rank of 6th) and the leadership of Kelvin Sampson, one of the best coaches in the country. Other than losing Jamal Shead, they return most of a rotation that was good enough to get a 1 seed in 2024, and they get Terrance Arceneaux back from injury.

The best offense in the country is predicted to belong to Gonzaga, who slots in at #2 overall behind Houston. The Duke Blue Devils profile as the best roster in the entire country, led by hopeful number-one pick Cooper Flagg, who is ranked in our top 10 players in the preseason. Duke has the highest preseason variance of any team in the top 20, leading to a high-ceiling / low-floor outlook. Auburn rounds out the top five, partially because they have the most valuable player in the sport in Johni Broome, according to my player projections model.

My model is slightly lower on Kansas (7th) and UConn (9th) than other preseason rankings I’ve seen. If Dan Hurley weren’t returning as the head coach, UConn would be ranked closer to 20th, as the talent on this roster is a bit lower analytically than other top 10 teams. Hurley’s tremendous coaching ability keeps them playing above their on-paper talent level. As for Kansas, their roster looks very strong, 2nd best in the entire country. The gap between 3rd place (Duke) and 7th is tiny, so I wouldn’t read too much into their placement at the back of that group behind the top two teams.

The Big Ten’s top-ranked team is Purdue (11th), but Indiana is not that far behind at 17th. The Hoosiers have a roster talent ranking of 9th best in the country thanks to some big-time offseason additions headlined by Oumar Ballo.

Of the teams with new coaches, Kentucky (22nd) and Arkansas (23rd) are ranked the highest, followed by Michigan (26th) and BYU (28th). UK has no players ranked in the preseason top 100, but their rotation might be as deep as any in the country, as every player in their best eight falls in the top 250 nationally. As for Arkansas, DJ Wagner is expected to be much better than last year, as he slots right inside the top 100 players in the preseason.

My model also seems to be particularly high on Iowa (31st), Vanderbilt (35th), VCU (41st), and Dayton (44th).

There are several teams on which my preseason rankings are more bearish. The most obvious one is Rutgers, who seems to be in the preseason AP top 25 conversation despite being 70th in my model. A couple of factors in play here lead to a lower projection for the Scarlet Knights. Five-star freshmen, even top-5 freshmen such as Ace Bailey and Dylan Harper, are just as likely to dramatically underperform expectations as they are to be in the All-American discussion. A study I produced in 2022 shows how high-school recruiting ranking corresponds to freshman-year impact as measured by Bayesian Performance Rating. A freshman or two typically end the year in the top 10 nationally, but it’s tough to accurately predict who they will be. Last year, the top two freshmen in BPR were Reed Sheppard (ranked 79th at 247Sports) and Stephon Castle (ranked 9th), while top prospects like Isaiah Collier, Justin Edwards, and DJ Wagner underperformed. For that reason, both Bailey and Harper fall outside the top 70 players in the country in the preseason. If they both perform better than that, Rutgers will see a considerable jump in their ranking. My model also doesn’t particularly love any of the supporting cast on the team, either. There is a higher level of uncertainty attached to the team’s preseason projection, so if Rutgers starts performing like a top-25 team, their ranking will adjust more quickly. Xavier is also ranked lower than consensus at 29th, as well as Miami at 58.

What’s Next?

I’ve spent the entire offseason building some extremely useful tools that will debut at EvanMiya.com in the next several weeks. I’m shooting to release a new player skill projections tool the week of October 21st for premium subscribers, and a new lineup projections, grades, and optimizer feature a few days into the CBB season, also for EvanMiya.com premium subscribers. I would say more, but that would spoil the fun.