There have been a few questions about the influence of the preseason ratings and how this works itself out of the system early in the season. This is handled the same as last season, the details of which are here. You can just subtract one day from the key dates mentioned in that post. One important update is that subscribers can access raw values for both efficiency and tempo. One can go to a team page and click on either of the efficiency values. This will take you to a page with the raw values for every team in Division I.

The raw values are useful from a factual standpoint, but even with the preseason influence, the adjusted values are still your best bet for describing a team’s true ability relative to the rest of the country. Actually, that should read “especially with the preseason influence.” The benefit of allowing the preseason ratings to have some influence at this point in the season is to combat the problems of small sample size.

For instance, right now the Sagarin predictor has Wisconsin at the top and Marquette as the fourth-best team in the nation and I expect my ratings would be the same were it not still including the preseason ratings. Wisconsin and Marquette are very good teams, but I think we can agree they are most likely not the best and fourth-best teams in the country at this point, and the weighting placed on the preseason numbers prevents the ratings here from being quite so bullish on either team.