Ranking every team in college basketball from Florida A&M (351) to Duke (1)

We forecast what we can and happily cede the rest to the players and the drama they improvise on the court. Sports Illustrated’s College Basketball Projection System, now in its third year, simulates the season 10,000 times and ranks teams 1–351 according to their average efficiency. Last year in the preseason, we identified North Carolina as a weak No. 1 in a historically wide-open field—and five months later, the Tar Heels led Villanova with 15 minutes left in the national title game. What transpired after that, culminating in Kris Jenkins’s buzzer-beating three, was the greatest finish in the history of the sport. You don’t get Jenkins’s dagger without the exhilarating crapshoot that is the single-elimination NCAA tournament, and you don’t get the nation’s most accurate preseason projections—as ours have been for the past two years—without running 10,000 simulations. 

This project starts from the ground up, assessing every roster, player by player. For offense, the system projects efficiency and shot volume by considering past performance, recruiting rankings and advanced AAU stats, development curves for similar Division I players over the past 14 seasons, the quality of a player’s teammates and his coach’s ability to develop and maximize talent. Those stats are weighted based on the team’s rotation—including scouting intel on who’s expected to play—then used to produce each team’s offensive efficiency projection. (The simulations account for variance in individual performances as well as injury scenarios.) Team defensive efficiency projections are based on players’ projected rebound, steal and block percentages, height (taller frontcourts make for stingier D), experience (veterans have fewer lapses) and coaches’ defensive résumés. For a deeper look at how our model works, read this explainer, and for all of our analytics-driven preview content, click here.

While our projections saw no dominant teams in the 2015–16 preseason, this year they view Duke as a juggernaut, ranking first in offensive efficiency by a wide margin and 11th in defense. We went back and examined every preseason No. 1 from the past decade—using beginning-of-season rosters to project performance—to see how these Blue Devils stacked up, and starting with the ‘07–08 preseason, only one team had a stronger projection. That was ‘08–09 North Carolina, which came into that season with a veteran, national player of the year candidate in power forward Tyler Hansbrough; a supporting cast of efficient sidekicks in guards Ty Lawson, Wayne Ellington and Danny Green; and two elite freshmen big men in Ed Davis and Tyler Zeller. 

In 2009–10, when Butler made the first of its back-to-back runs to the national championship game, it had more than just wunderkind coach Brad Stevens and future NBA draft picks Gordon Hayward and Shelvin Mack on its side. The Bulldogs also had a remarkable level of roster continuity, bringing back every rotation player from a team that finished 38th in efficiency the previous season. They allocated a nation-high 93.2% of their minutes to the same players from ‘08–09, made substantial improvements—and came within a halfcourt heave of upsetting Duke in the title game. Wisconsin, which finished 38th in efficiency last season—just like ‘08–09 Butler—brings back 99% of its minutes played, and our projections think the Badgers can improve enough to chase their third Final Four in four years.

The player data we’ve gathered from the past 14 seasons gives us a unique window into how much can be realistically expected out of highly ranked recruits. Players outside the top 20 of the Recruiting Services Consensus Index tend to take until Year 2 to break out, and those second-tier recruits tend to make the biggest freshman-to-sophomore offensive leaps of any players in D-I. That bodes well for Louisville, which lost key seniors Damion Lee and Trey Lewis, but has two former top-40 recruits ready to take over in sophomore combo guard Donovan Mitchell and wing Deng Adel. Both of them flashed breakout-star potential during their appearance at the adidas Nations camp in Garden Grove, Calif., this summer, and they’re a big reason why the Cardinals are ranked 13th and projected to finish fourth in a loaded ACC.

Some of our system’s most contrarian positions appear in this section, starting with it having Michigan State—a team some human rankings have in the top 10—all the way down at 28. The model believes that the Spartans’ loss of valuable frontcourt players Matt Costello and Deyonta Davis to the pros, plus early season injuries to Ben Carter and Gavin Schilling, creates a rebounding-and-rim-protection void that drags their defense down to 69th overall in efficiency. The model sees similar issues occurring at Maryland (21st in the Coaches’ Poll, 36th here) and Iowa State (27th in Coaches, 39th here).

This tier includes two former Duke assistant coaches trying to break through to the NCAA tournament in their relatively new jobs—but to earn at-large bids, Steve Wojciechowski’s Marquette team (whom we rank 51st) and Chris Collins’s Northwestern team (56th) will need to outperform their projections by a few wins apiece. Slightly lower, at Nos. 64 and 65, respectively, are two teams that project to be formidable 12-seeds: UNC-Wilmington, which led Duke at halftime of a 4–13, first-round tourney game in March, and Monmouth, one of the best mid-majors that didn’t make the Big Dance last season. 

Florida A&M, which lost out on the No. 351 crown to Central Connecticut last season, is projected to win it in ‘16–17. The Rattlers had the nation’s least-efficient offense in ‘15–16, and their only double-digit scorer, Malcolm Bernard, departed on a graduate transfer to Xavier. This final group isn’t entirely lost-cause territory, though: Two teams here—Jackson State (No. 275) and South Carolina State (284)—are projected to finish second in their leagues, giving them decent odds of winning a conference tournament and earning an automatic bid to the NCAAs.

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