X in at #17!

[yellow20xd]

i know it TOTALLY SUBJECTIVE but it's amazing who Xavier is ranked ahead of.... great job Muskies!!!... Dan

[madness31]

Considering there are no comments about some of the programs having X number of draft picks and all-americans I'd assume it is a typo and should be included as a positive. Others do have both listed as positives including a school with 5 draft pics. Not a huge difference between 2 and 5 so either 2 is neutral or was entered on the wrong line.

A losing season isn't bad considering the number of years involved but should be noted as a negative. The fact that it is only 1 shows that our negatives are few and far between. The biggest problem is the lack of a final 4 but it is coming.

Living in Columbus, I just want to point out that it is huge that we rank ahead of OSU. People here are barely aware of the program and those that do know of us typically root against us. Sometimes they are UD grads and a specific event was when we played Hawaii in the tourney and one of their players was the brother of an OSU player. I argued with an OSU fan 2 years back that our basketball tradition over the past 20 years was more impressive then theirs and she (played D-2 basketball) about laughed.

Pictured on the mens home page on ESPN is great press and the ranking should make the recruiting process easier for years to come.

[muskieman]

I guess ud hasn't been ranked yet!

[RONALD78]

Congrats to X this is good to great being 17. Looking at those near the top with almost double Xavier's points will make it almost impossible to ever crack the top 10 etc although that is NOT important. The 20 points Xavier got for making the elite 8 and losing pushed them up from 25 to 17....so it is obvious that a few things can swing any team from 15 to 40th very easy.

[tacitus]

Congrats to X this is good to great being 17. Looking at those near the top with almost double Xavier's points will make it almost impossible to ever crack the top 10 etc although that is NOT important. The 20 points Xavier got for making the elite 8 and losing pushed them up from 25 to 17....so it is obvious that a few things can swing any team from 15 to 40th very easy.

I think you can move from 40th to 15th fairly easily, say having one very awesome season with 30 wins, a conference championship, a final four appearance, a couple draft picks and perhaps an all american. Im sure D-West's senior season, the first run and even last year resulted in us moving up significantly on this list -- well deserved too! But moving so far the other way is almost impossible. Once you have the points and accomplishments, they are not going to go away in a year, or two or three. You would have to perform very poorly for a couple years, having losing seasons, recruiting issues and NCAA bans, while those around you are having good seasons. If this were the case, well you deserve to drop. Otherwise, a mediocre or even well below average season can only knock you down a couple places, and that only if teams within striking "distance" do well and you don't have that many relatively recent accomplishments to begin with...


Everything is subjective and has its biases, and I'm sure they even missed a couple points for a couple teams here and there. There are a few teams much higher than we would expect them, riding on glory of 15-20 years ago or just a consistency of slightly above average. But this is a pretty good system for analyzing the last 25 years. At the very least, it tells us what analysts see as important for a program's prestige, and why they favor some over others in the media. I think most of us would agree on the importance of the things they list, even if we don't agree with the point distribution, i.e. the relative importance. But that is subjective too... If we went to the Final Four or won it all last year, we would be all for a ten point bonus for being the most recent champions... actually I like that, kind of like a radioactive decay with a half life. Accomplishments depreciate in value over time. This would be more in tune with reality, and would actually help X, since are more impressive accomplishments are recent. Anyways...