HHS Top 25: Takeaways from picking the top 25 teams all season long
If you followed Her Hoop Stats on social media during the 2018–19 women’s basketball season, you probably came across at least one of our articles that discussed our top 25 ballot for that week. For 19 weeks from the start of the season to Selection Monday, Her Hoop Stats submitted our top 25 teams to the Sport Tours International/Hoopfeed Top 25 Poll. The season ended with Baylor claiming its third national championship, but a season of top-25 voting wouldn’t feel complete without looking back at all the movement among teams and the lessons the Her Hoop Stats staff learned along the way.
Movement In and Out of the Top 25
There was remarkable parity in women’s basketball this season, and the volatility of our rankings illustrates that competitive balance. A whopping 37 different teams cracked our top 25 for at least one week, 14 cracked our top 10, and four (Notre Dame, UConn, Louisville, and Baylor) spent at least one week at No. 1. Baylor was the final team to assume our No. 1 ranking and held it the longest, for the last eight weeks of the season.
Of the 37 teams that appeared on our ballot at least once, 26 were ranked for more than half of the season and 14 were ranked for all 19 weeks. The top 10 stayed relatively stable: eight teams never fell out, anchored by a top six in which every team was ranked as high as No. 2 at some point during the season. Here is a chart of the week-by-week ranks for our top six teams:
If you think this graph shows a lot of movement, imagine what a graph would look like with all 37 teams that made the top 25 this season. Yet, despite all of the movement, our rankings on Selection Monday looked somewhat similar to those at the start of the season. Eighteen of the 25 teams that were ranked in Week 1 were also ranked in Week 19. But the order was definitely jumbled — in fact, Stanford was the only ranked team that ended up exactly where it started (No. 7). The biggest riser was Miami (FL), which began the season at No. 22 on our ballot and ended it at No. 12. On the other end of the spectrum, four teams that were initially ranked in our top 15 were unranked at season’s end, led by Tennessee (Week 1’s No. 11).
Of the teams that stayed in our top 25 all season, UConn had the best average rank of 2.2. Notre Dame and Louisville followed at 3.3, and Baylor and Oregon each recorded average ranks of 3.9. UConn and Oregon State had the least volatility in their ranks, moving within a range of only 3 places all season long. Marquette (range: 13 places; final rank: No. 14) and Texas (range: 10 places; final rank: No. 21) were much more volatile week-to-week.
Voting is Hard (and Other Lessons Learned)
The Her Hoop Stats team found it increasingly difficult to rank teams as the season progressed. With more games came more data points about every team, and oftentimes those data points conflicted. It’s easy to say in Week 1 that no team should be ranked below a team it has beaten, but what happens when two teams split two match-ups? That happened many times this season, with one of the most memorable being Stanford’s victory over Oregon in the Pac-12 Tournament championship game three weeks after losing to the Ducks by 40 points at home. Or what about Notre Dame beating Duke, Duke beating North Carolina, and … North Carolina beating Notre Dame? Looking at the three teams’ overall bodies of work, Notre Dame was clearly the best team of the three, but focusing too narrowly on head-to-head results can obscure that.
On a related note, voters must not overreact to any one performance, good or bad. Take Oregon as an example: just because the Ducks beat a top-10 team in Stanford by 40 points did not mean that they would cruise through the rest of the season or even beat Stanford again in the Pac-12 Tournament. Sometimes teams just have really good (or bad) days, and as a voter, you’re trying to figure out what level a team performs at on a consistent basis.
As the season progresses, there is also the question of weighting results based on when they happened. A loss at the beginning of the season might feel like an aberration by January, especially if the team has lost or gained players based on injuries, NCAA eligibility, etc. There is no right answer to how much voters should discount early-season results; rather, the key is to be consistent across teams and week-to-week in whatever approach a voter picks.
Sometimes, too, a team seems to have the potential to be a top-25 team, but its results don’t merit giving that team a spot on the ballot. In the first few weeks of the season, sometimes it makes sense to give teams the benefit of the doubt as they develop chemistry and incorporate new players. But eventually voters have to take teams at face value and let go of preseason expectations. South Carolina is an instructive example: we ranked the Gamecocks No. 9 in the preseason, but they started the season 4–4. Their non-conference schedule was brutal, but they still had to prove they deserved to be ranked in the top 25. The Gamecocks fell out of our rankings for several weeks until they started to beat good SEC teams and developed a top-25-caliber resume. At the end of the day, teams have to back up their potential with performance.
Thank you to everyone who followed along with our top 25 ballots during the 2018–19 season and to Sport Tours International and Hoopfeed for inviting Her Hoop Stats to vote in their weekly poll. I’d also like to thank all of the Her Hoop Stats staff who offered their thoughts on the ballot throughout the season. Finally, the real MVP of our top-25 voting process was the Her Hoop Stats “Compare Teams” page, which I encourage you to check out if you haven’t already. (It’s exactly what it sounds like and more.)
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