Her Hoop Stats Ranks Its Top 25 Teams
On Tuesday, Sport Tours International (STI) and Hoopfeed released their first Top 25 rankings for the 2018–19 women’s basketball season. The weekly rankings are determined by polling media members and other women’s basketball experts. Here at Her Hoop Stats, we are excited to contribute to their rankings throughout the season.
With the first week of voting complete, we thought we’d share our ballot and explain how we chose these 25 teams and put them in this order.
1. Notre Dame
2. UConn
3. Louisville
4. Oregon
5. Mississippi State
6. Baylor
7. Stanford
8. Oregon State
9. South Carolina
10. Maryland
11. Tennessee
12. Texas
13. Iowa
14. Georgia
15. Missouri
16. DePaul
17. North Carolina State
18. Syracuse
19. Marquette
20. South Florida
21. Texas A&M
22. Miami (FL)
23. Arizona State
24. West Virginia
25. California
Our ballot was broadly similar to the STI/Hoopfeed rankings for Week 1. We had the same list of 25 teams, and no team was ranked more than two spots higher or lower on our ballot than where it ended up in the STI/Hoopfeed rankings. The 25 teams included six from the SEC; five from the ACC; five from the Pac-12; three from the Big 12; and two each from the American, Big Ten, and Big East Conferences.
Her Hoop Stats compared teams based on who we thought would win a best-of-seven series right now on a neutral floor. It’s important to reward teams for winning games that they should win and closing out close games, but it’s also important not to overreact to a respectable loss to a higher-ranked team.
For an example, let’s look at Oregon’s 75–73 win over Syracuse last Saturday. Oregon was ranked No. 3 and Syracuse was ranked No. 18 in each of the two preseason polls (AP and USA Today). Oregon led by 15 points in the second quarter, yet found itself down by six with two minutes left in the game. Each team clearly outplayed the other at times, with both teams going on double-digit scoring runs. If these teams played a seven-game series, it would almost certainly go more than four games. In our minds, Syracuse shouldn’t be punished for the close loss, especially since the game was played in Eugene. But Oregon did look shaky at times, and we took that into account in our voting.
Overall, four teams that were ranked in one or both preseason polls lost last week: Syracuse, Duke (AP #21/USA #20), Arizona State (#23/Received Votes), and UCLA (RV/#23). We kept Syracuse at No. 18 after the loss to Oregon, for the reasons mentioned earlier. Consistent with that, we kept Arizona State at No. 23 on our ballot after its 65–59 loss to preseason No. 4/5 Baylor. But Duke and UCLA lost to unranked teams (Northwestern and Loyola Marymount, respectively) and were left off our ballot this week.
While we did not penalize teams for hard-fought losses to higher-ranked teams, we did downgrade a few teams for less-than-convincing performances: Oregon (HHS #4), Baylor (HHS #6), and Texas (preseason #11/8; HHS #12). In Texas’s case, the Longhorns were only up four points against North Texas on Monday with five minutes to play before securing a 64–54 win. Contrast that with our No. 11 team, Tennessee, which routed Presbyterian 97–49 in its only game of the week.
How do you think we did with our ballot? What teams did we miss, underestimate, or overrate? Let us know in the comments section below or on Twitter (@herhoopstats), and keep an eye out for our rankings on the Hoopfeed website throughout the season.
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