We spend 3 to 4 months leading up to the season obsessively clicking on every way-too-early ranking, parsing each useless projected March Madness bracket and otherwise binging on any morsel or blurb mentioning our favorite team. But by December, all of those hours spent angrily yelling on Twitter about perceived slights are pretty much forgotten about. And by March there will be 0 recollection of those efforts, only to be repeated once more the minute a new champion is crowned.
With that in mind, I’ve made a habit of logging projections I run into over the summer and fall the past few years, and being a Marquette blog, focusing mostly on the Big East, in order to do a better job of putting on-court results in perspective with media expectations/predictions. This isn’t meant to be a gotcha to any specific outlet, but rather help publicize what the consensus was before the season started.
Below you’ll find two tables, one with Big East order of finish projections from 1 to 11, and then DI projected ranks (most all the way to 360+, but a few only the top-100). You’ll be able to click on the link to be able to read (or hear) it yourself as well. I’ll keep updating the results through tipoff.
Big East Projections
Here are the Big East results for projected order of finish:
While seeing the average results is my desired outcome, rather than any single projection, one other valuable piece is projecting the tiers, rather than specific slots.
Be sure to keep this handy all year.
Full NCAA Projections
For the DI rankings, we don’t have quite as robust a sample, but we get much more variations on the result.
And here is how those tiers shake out.
Unlike the Big East ones, you can see the clear gap between Butler and Marquette, as well as between DePaul and Georgetown. And there’s basically zero difference between Providence, Hall or St. John’s. Something to keep a close eye on this season.
Feel free to send any questions of complaints my way in the comments or to @PaintTouches on Twitter.
