Luke DeCock’s AP Top 25 basketball poll ballot: Preseason

Luke DeCock
·3 min read
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First, the good news for everyone, especially me: This will be my last season as an AP men’s basketball voter, at least for a year. I’ll be turning this ballot over to my colleague C.L. Brown after the season. I’ve agonized over the balance between contributing to the college basketball discourse and the abuse that unfortunately comes with it for a couple of seasons now and it was a good time to make a transition.

But that will be a sabbatical, not a retirement. The plan is to rotate seasons after that, which is probably the best way to address that tricky balance. So like Mike Krzyzewski, I’ll make a farewell tour, but unlike Krzyzewski it’s not a permanent farewell.

As far as the preseason top 25 goes, this will probably be the closest I’ve ever been to the consensus. As weird as last season was, it seems like things came of it in relatively comprehensible shape and everybody -- voters and otherwise are in pretty good agreement who the top 10 or so and who the top 25-30 teams are.

I’m higher on Memphis and Xavier (Again with Xavier! This happens almost every year!) and lower on Oregon, Auburn and Virginia, but everyone else is within nine spots on my ballot from where they ended up in the poll, and even the differences that are there are really splitting hairs in the preseason. Auburn and Virginia were definitely under consideration, but I wanted to show Belmont some love, and in the end I have zero issues with consensus.

The usual word on methodology: From here on out, I will rely heavily on analytics (specifically KenPom’s efficiency ratings [predictive, how good we think you are] and Wins Above Bubble [results-based, how good what you’ve done is, I use the version at barttorvik.com but there are others]), one game is just one data point of 30 so I will not overreact to head-to-head results, and most important: I hate your team and under no circumstances do I know what I’m talking about or should be allowed to vote, or so I’m told.

LAST SEASON’S BALLOTS

Preseason | Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 8 | Week 9 | Week 10 | Week 11 | Week 12 | Week 13 | Week 14 | Week 15 | Week 16

PRESEASON TOP 25 BASKETBALL BALLOT

1. Gonzaga (actual poll rank: 1)

2. Memphis (12)

3. Kansas (3)

4. UCLA (2)

5. Texas (5)

6. Villanova (4)

7. Michigan (6)

8. Purdue (7)

9. Duke (9)

10. Illinois (11)

11. Baylor (8)

12. Tennessee (18)

13. Houston (15)

14. Alabama (14)

15. St. Bonaventure (23)

16. Kentucky (10)

17. North Carolina (19)

18. Connecticut (24)

19. Maryland (21)

20. Xavier (NR-32)

21. Ohio State (17)

22. Arkansas (16)

23. Oregon (13)

24. Florida State (20)

25. Belmont (NR-38)

PRESEASON ALL-AMERICA PICKS

  • Max Abmas, Oral Roberts

  • Kofi Cockburn, Illinois

  • Hunter Dickinson, Michigan

  • Johnny Juzang, UCLA

  • Drew Timme, Gonzaga (POY)