Alternative College Basketball Rankings

12/12/2017

The college sports AP ranking system is the most important ranking policy across college basketball and college football. It as become less important for college football as the college football playoff committee now decides who plays for the national championship but with college basketball, the AP rankings are as important as ever to decide who gets college basketball bragging rights for the week.  

However, as with any ranking system the AP Top 25 is flawed due to voting biases and a bevy of other factors that make the system flawed. So I propose a new ranking system that will be updated week by week through the college football and basketball seasons, in this system any time a lower ranked team defeats a higher ranked team the two teams switch rankings. So for example, lets say team A is ranked 3rd in the nation and team B is an unranked team, in a future matchup in which team B upsets team A, team B then becomes the 3rd ranked team in the nation and team A is now unranked. For the fun of it we'll call this ranking system the Ric Flair ranking system in honor of his now infamous quote "To be the man, you gotta beat the man."  

To get our initial top 25, we rely on the preseason AP top 25 but from that point on we let the chaos of college athletics do the ranking for us.

College Basketball Week 6 Rankings

(*Denotes teams not ranked in the AP poll)

Under the Ric Flair ranking system, Boston College is the best team in the country while Ball State and Northern Iowa are both top 10 teams. 


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