I have a lot of respect for anyone that compiles a pre-season ranking. For that reason, I rarely make judgments (at least publicly) on the many lists that start popping up around now. It is pretty easy to defend a wide variety of opinions on any one team. At this time last season, if you had said Syracuse was going to get a one-seed and North Carolina would miss the tournament, I would have politely disagreed and ended up looking foolish. <\/p>\n
Andy Katz probably does the most famous off-season top 25<\/a>. By the time he revealed the latest iteration last week, I suspect it was the result of many criticisms, constructive and otherwise, of his first draft in April. As such, it\u2019s probably a good predictor of the pre-season media and coaches polls that will be unveiled shortly. Katz had Purdue ranked second until Robbie Hummel\u2019s tragic ACL tear that will cost him the season. After that news, he dropped Purdue to 23rd<\/a>. I find this stunningly low. <\/p>\n Look at it this way \u2013 Temple was previously 23rd in Katz\u2019s list. If you added a healthy Hummel to Temple, I don\u2019t think you would consider the Owls to be national-title material. If you think Hummel had some special value to Purdue that he wouldn\u2019t have on another team, leave him out of the argument for a second. Pick any<\/i> player in college basketball and add him to Temple\u2019s roster. He still couldn’t make the Owls\u2019 the second-best team in America.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a big gap between 2 and 23 in college hoops. Perhaps an 18-year old Shaquille O\u2019Neal could account for such a difference, but I don\u2019t believe Hummel does. Purdue is no longer the favorite to be the best team in the Big Ten and their national title hopes are damaged, but it’s also premature to rule out those possibilities. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have a lot of respect for anyone that compiles a pre-season ranking. For that reason, I rarely make judgments (at least publicly) on the many lists that start popping up around now. It is pretty easy to defend a wide variety of opinions on any one team. At this time last season, if you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}