The pre-season AP poll is great
by Ken Pomeroy on Monday, November 1, 2010
You might be surprised to hear this, but I’m a big fan of the pre-season AP poll. There is no doubt poll participants have their biases in the pre-season. They may tend to over-estimate the importance of the previous postseason, especially when a team needed more than its fair share of luck to advance. But otherwise, whatever biases are present are uniquely individual, and in the collection of 70 or so ballots, those biases are cancelled out, leaving a useful signal. The end result is that it provides a better picture of the state of college hoops before the season begins than any single person or algorithm could produce. It’s informed groupthink at its finest.
While experts naturally try to declare which teams are too high or too low in the polls, I imagine their success is like financial experts trying to pick a winning mutual fund. Some people are…