HHS Top 25: Louisville and Notre Dame Are 1–2 Ahead of Thursday’s Showdown
On Thursday, Baylor beat then-No. 1 UConn in front of a raucous home crowd. The victory was part of a great week for Lady Bears head coach Kim Mulkey, who followed up her first-ever win against a No. 1 team with her 550th career win against Texas Tech on Sunday. It was also part of a great week for the underdog, as three other previously unbeaten teams lost and six top-25 teams fell to unranked opponents.
After all of those losses, we gave 21 of our top 25 teams a new number next to their name and welcomed two previously unranked teams — Miami (FL) and Indiana — on the ballot that we submitted to the STI/Hoopfeed Top 25 Poll for Week 9. This week’s poll covered games played from Tuesday, January 1 through Monday, January 7. Movement up or down from our Week 8 ballot is denoted in parentheses.
1. Louisville (↑1)
2. Notre Dame (↑1)
3. UConn (↓2)
4. Oregon
5. Stanford
6. Baylor (↑1)
7. Mississippi State (↓1)
8. North Carolina State (↑1)
9. Oregon State (↑1)
10. Tennessee (↓2)
11. Maryland
12. Syracuse
13. Iowa (↑1)
14. Marquette (↑2)
15. Minnesota (↓2)
16. Texas (↓1)
17. Gonzaga (↑3)
18. Kentucky (↑1)
19. Michigan State (↓2)
20. Iowa State (↑5)
21. Miami (FL) (NR)
22. Drake (↓1)
23. California (↓1)
24. DePaul (↓6)
25. Indiana (NR)
Also considered: Arizona, Missouri, South Carolina, Rutgers, Arizona State, Florida State
Dropped out: Texas A&M, South Dakota
There was less consensus among the Her Hoop Stats staff on this week’s top 25 than for any previous ballot. The bulk of our discussion focused on ranking the top seven teams. Each week, we choose our top 25 based on several factors, and because different people weigh those factors slightly differently, a case could be made after this week of games to put the top seven teams in any order. For example:
If you value winning percentage, Louisville is your clear No. 1 as the only undefeated team of the top seven. From there, it’s a matter of which team has the “best” loss. Notre Dame arguably does, with its lone loss being to UConn at home. Mississippi State, UConn, and Baylor all also lost to fellow top-seven teams. Stanford and Oregon have the “worst” losses, though road losses to top-25 teams Gonzaga and Michigan State, respectively, are nothing to be ashamed of.
If you value strength of schedule, Notre Dame and Stanford are your top teams. One way to measure a team’s strength of schedule is by its opponents’ winning percentage. Notre Dame’s opponents are winning 70.6 percent of their games, best in the country. To put that number into context, only 32 other Division I teams have an opponent winning percentage of even 60 percent. One of those 32 teams is Stanford (60.8%), whose resume includes back-to-back wins over Baylor and Tennessee in December.
The rest of the top seven teams follow in this order: Baylor (59.2%), Oregon (58.1%), UConn (56.9%), Louisville (54.6%), Mississippi State (52.9%).
Another way to measure strength of schedule also gives the edge to Notre Dame and Stanford. It calculates opponents’ average scoring margin (points scored minus points allowed) per 100 possessions. Notre Dame’s opponents have the second-highest average margin in the country, at 13.7 points per 100 possessions, and Stanford’s have the 17th-highest margin at 8.7. UConn and Oregon follow, and Baylor, Louisville, and Mississippi State bring up the rear on this metric.
If you value margin of victory, Mississippi State is your pick. The Bulldogs have beaten opponents by an average of 37.3 points per game, best in the country. That’s nearly nine points more than the second-best team in the country, Baylor (28.7 points per game). Regardless of strength of schedule, that’s tough to do.
Oregon, UConn, and Notre Dame are all beating opponents by over 25 points per game, while Louisville and Stanford win by an average of 20.8 and 17.6 points per game, respectively. (From my perspective, the takeaway here is that this is why these are the top seven teams — they’re all dominating almost every night.)
If you’re inclined to give historically good teams the benefit of the doubt, UConn and Notre Dame are probably your choices. UConn’s loss to Baylor was its first regular-season loss since 2014, while the Irish returned nearly everyone from last season’s championship team.
And if you value head-to-head results, well… things get tricky. Oregon beat Mississippi State. Stanford beat Baylor, which beat UConn, which beat Notre Dame. You could conceivably put those six in that order, but what about Louisville? The Cardinals haven’t played any of the other top seven teams, so you’d need to rely on another factor, which would likely provide some data that contradicts at least one of these head-to-head results.
As you can see, our top seven doesn’t adhere perfectly to any one of these factors. We looked at the teams’ full resumes, especially their performances against teams in or near the top 25 in our Her Hoop Stats rating. The good news is that Louisville will play Notre Dame on Thursday in the season’s second match-up between the top two teams. (The first was UConn’s victory over Notre Dame in December.) Not only do we expect a very entertaining and close game, but it will also provide another data point to inform our Week 10 ballot.
Let us know what you value most in a team’s resume in the comments section below or on Twitter (@herhoopstats), and keep an eye out for our rankings on the Hoopfeed website throughout the season.
If you like this content, please support our work at Her Hoop Stats by subscribing for just $20 a year. All stats are from Her Hoop Stats for games through January 8.
