Do Preseason Rankings Matter? Yes and No ...

IU is starting to appear in the top-20 of several offseason rankings by notable national college basketball writers. What should IU fans make of this given the program's mixed bag of recent results?

Photo lifted from Trey Galloway’s Twitter account

Every year around this time, two things start to happen in unison:

• College basketball writers across the country start posting their frequently updated offseason rankings.

• A chorus of IU fans dismiss the rankings as meaningless.

This cycle continues all the way up until the official AP preseason poll gets published before the new season tips off.

My response to this is always the same:

No, preseason rankings don’t mean anything concrete — in the sense that any individual team can over- or under-perform their ranking to an extreme degree. We see a few examples of this every season, and we’ve seen it with IU (more on this below).

But the rankings themselves do matter for two reasons:

1. Over time, in aggregate, preseason (and offseason) rankings have tended to be fairly good predictors of the overall talent level of a roster, which tends to be the largest predictor of whether that team will have a successful season or not.

2. It’s better for your program’s reputation in both a micro and macro sense to be anchored to high preseason rankings as opposed to low ones. The natural bias of rankers, analysts, and fans alike is to give more benefit of the doubt to teams that start ranked higher, in large part because of what I explained in #1.

Now … what if we zoom in on Indiana?

The troubled recent history of Indiana’s preseason rankings and actual performance

When you look specifically at Indiana’s recent history of preseason rankings and actual results, two trends emerge:

1. When it comes to making the NCAA Tournament, Indiana rarely makes it without being a top-30 team in the preseason. (I’m guessing you could say this about many schools.)

2. However, good preseason rankings have not been a reliable predictor of a successful season for IU … which is a big reason why Indiana has had three coaches since its last Sweet 16 appearance.

Below is a table showing Indiana’s preseason and final rankings in KenPom and the AP poll, plus each season’s tournament outcome, since 2011.

Note: I stopped at 2011 because that’s when KenPom stops showing preseason rankings, and it’s when the AP poll archive stops showing “Others Receiving Votes.” Between 2002 and 2010, Indiana only appeared in the AP preseason poll four times and the AP final poll twice. Yeah, we’ve been in the wilderness for a while.

What are the key takeaways from this table? Here is what I take away from it:

• On average, Indiana has underperformed its preseason KenPom rankings by almost 12 spots. There are nine season of underperformance, two seasons of equal performance, and three seasons of over-performance (but only one since 2012).

• Indiana has reached the NCAA Tournament six times since 2011. In five of those seasons, Indiana was ranked 30th or better in the KenPom preseason rankings. In four of those seasons, Indiana was ranked or receiving votes in the AP poll. The outlier, again, was that magical 2012 season when Indiana blew past expectations.

• There have been four instances of an Indiana team missing the NCAA Tournament despite being ranked 27th or better in the KenPom preseason projections or 30th or better in the AP poll.

• Since 2013, Indiana has outperformed preseason expectations just once: in 2016, by two spots in KenPom and one spot in the AP poll.

• In Tom Crean’s final seven seasons at IU, his teams underperformed their preseason KenPom ranking just three times, but the underperformances were by an average of 29.3 spots.

• In Archie Miller’s four seasons at IU, his teams underperformed their preseason KenPom ranking three times, with an average underperformance of 18.3 spots.

• Each of Mike Woodson’s three Indiana teams have underperformed their preseason KenPom rankings, with an average underperformance of 25.7.

• Overall, since 2017, Indiana has not over-performed its preseason expectation even one time. The average underperformance has been by 20 spots.

So, umm … yikes!

If any non-IU fan is reading this, and wants some insight into the fragile psyche of the fan base at large, this table tells a pretty compelling story.

The last 13 seasons, plus most of the decade prior to that, have produced very few significant high-water marks — mainly the Big Ten titles in 2013 and 2016.

Instead, Indiana basketball has mostly been defined by expectations of good or great seasons that have often delivered poor or merely satisfactory results.

Which brings us to the latest offseason rankings circulating in the wake of Indiana’s impressive April on the recruiting trail.

What to make of Indiana’s optimistic offseason rankings?

Here is a quick sampling:

• ESPN’s Jeff Borzello: 16th

• CBS’ Gary Parrish: 20th

• Jon Rothstein: 20th

There are others, but most have Indiana somewhere in this neighborhood … which is similar to where the Hoosiers were ranked in the preseason in 2023 (4 seed), 2017 (no tournament), and 2016 (Big Ten title and Sweet 16).

Assuming Indiana lands Luke Goode and a decent backup big, which should solidify or even slightly embolden these top-20 rankings, there are two ways to view it based on the historical precedence:

1. When Indiana is perceived to have top-20 talent, the season usually ends up pretty good.

When you include the 2013 season, in which IU was preseason #3 in KenPom and preseason #1 in the AP poll, Indiana has been a consensus top-20 team four times. Those seasons resulted in:

• 2013: Big Ten Title and Sweet 16

• 2016: Big Ten Title and Sweet 16

• 2017: NIT loss and coach fired

• 2023: Top-4 Big Ten finish and Round of 32

Those aren’t Blue Blood-level results, but they do represent the high-water marks for IU since 2002.

The big exception is that 2017 season, which started off like gangbusters (wins over Kansas and UNC, a top-5 ranking) only to fall of a cliff.

While there were so early warning signs, the massive drop-off occurred mostly because of OG Anunoby’s season-ending injury and Tom Crean’s inability to guide that still-talented roster through choppy February waters.

2. If Year 4 of the Mike Woodson Era is at all similar to years 1-3 in terms of underperformance, Indiana will not reach the heights of its preseason ranking ... but might still get back to the tournament.

There is no denying the facts that Indiana has underperformed its preseason rankings all three seasons under Mike Woodson.

And while it’s worth nothing that even an underperformance from a top-20 ranking can still result in a very good season (like 2023), that’s not the kind of success that IU fans have been longing for since 2002 — when the Hoosiers were ranked #22 in the preseason AP poll and went on to share a Big Ten title and make it to the national championship game.

It’s also fair to note that three seasons for a coach, even in this era, is still an incomplete sample size. Given given that Woody has faced significant injury and roster construction issues in two of his three seasons at IU, there is legitimate hope that, with good health, this could finally be the roster that Woody is able to guide to the heights of IU fans’ hopes and his own championship-laced rhetoric.

Final Thought

So, back to the original question of this piece: do preseason rankings matter?

On the one hand, yes, because every significant success of the last 25 years (save one) has been preceded by a preseason ranking of at least top-20.

But on the other hand, no, because there are also a handful of examples of top-30ish preseason rankings resulting in unsuccessful seasons, two of which resulted in coaching changes.

Personally, after a season in which IU opened at 50 and plummeted all the way down to 91 by season’s end, I’m choosing to focus on the “YES” part of this answer because it represents an important momentum shift for IU basketball under Mike Woodson.

And with what I think is the most talented and well-constructed roster IU has had since at least 2016, I find myself more and more willing to viscerally indulge in the optimism that this season will be closer to 2023 and 2016 than 2021 and 2017.

• What do you think?

• How are you processing the optimistic offseason rankings for IU’s rebuilt roster?

• Do you have any other takeaways from the results presented in the table?

Comment below!