How the AP preseason college basketball poll predicts success

The 2020-21 AP men's college basketball preseason poll was released on Monday, Nov. 9. Here's what the first preseason AP Top 25 poll looked like:

The release of the first AP poll of the season is always exciting, but is it a good indicator of how the basketball regular season will actually go?

We can answer this by looking at how well the preseason poll has lined up historically with the final AP poll of the season, which comes out in mid-March, before the NCAA tournament starts.

A team's fortune can change quite a bit in that time frame, but from our research of historical rankings from 2000 to 2019, the preseason poll is good prediction of how the regular season will play out.

College basketball rankings: Michigan State leads Andy Katz's preseason Power 36

Since the turn of the century, 526 teams have been ranked in the preseason AP Top 25. Of those, 328 were ranked at the end of the regular season. That’s 62.4 percent. Not a terrible mark.

But it gets better when you look at the top teams. If a team is ranked in the Top 10 to start the year, it’s close to a virtual lock that they’ll be ranked in the final poll, which is released prior to the NCAA tournament. Of the 210 teams ranked in the preseason top 10 since 2000, 173 finished in the AP Top 25 — a strong 82.4 percent.

Of course, there are some outliers here. This century, 37 teams have started the season in the top 10 and finished the regular season unranked. Ten of those were even more drastic, as they began the year in the top five:

Kentucky’s 2014 squad holds a distinction in this category as the only team since 2000 to start the regular season No. 1 and end it unranked. The 2014 Wildcats went 29-11 on the year, earning a No. 8 seed in the NCAA tournament. But there, they picked up steam, winning five straight games before losing to No. 7 seed UConn in the championship game, 60-54.

TEAM OF THE DECADE: Vote for the best teams this past decade

But there’s a brighter side to this story as well. 

Eight teams since 2000 have made an extremely impressive journey, starting the season unranked and finishing the regular season in the top five, including two teams last season.

Four of those teams ended up as No. 1 seeds in the NCAA tournament (and Dayton and Florida State could've contended for a No. 1 seed in 2020), and the other two schools earned No. 2 seeds — a mighty accomplishment for teams that started the season outside of the AP Top 25. But none of the six teams that played in the NCAA tournament made it to the Elite Eight.

So, if your team appears in the top 10 of the first poll, you can be fairly confident the regular season won’t be a bust. But — as history has proven — if they’re outside the AP Top 25, there’s always a chance.

BEST PLAYERS: Andy Katz's Top 25 for next season

If you want to take a look at past results yourself, here is a table of every team since 2000 that has started the season ranked, and where they ended up in the final AP poll: