Preseason Ceiling and Floor Team Outcomes

Using preseason simulations to get best and worst case scenarios for every team

Oct 18, 2024

Part of what makes college basketball so entertaining is how hard it is to predict who will be good. We argue all offseason about the minutia of every set of preseason rankings, only for them to all be massively wrong by January.

Instead of only looking at where every team is placed in my preseason team rankings at EvanMiya.com, a more interesting angle is to use the uncertainty estimates attached to each team’s preseason projection to obtain ceiling and floor outcomes for each team. Using 10,000 season simulations, I have calculated various possibilities for how the season will unfold.

Some teams have more uncertainty attached to their preseason projection than others. These teams usually have common themes: a new head coach, more reliance on freshmen, or more roster turnover. Teams like Arkansas, Michigan, and Duke have more variance, while the model is more confident in the possible outcomes for teams like Texas A&M, Cincinnati, and Houston.

To present this data, I’m breaking it down by conference and presenting the median (most likely), ceiling (95th percentile), and floor (5th percentile) outcomes for each team. This means there is a 90% chance a given team will have a national ranking within their ceiling and floor outcomes at the end of the year.

Only six teams have a ceiling finish of #1 in the country: Houston, Gonzaga, Alabama, Duke, Iowa State, and Kansas. While another team can be the best team at the end of the year, it’s much more unlikely than for these six.

Here are the teams presented by conference, from best conference to worst, according to the preseason conference strength rankings at EvanMiya.com: