While the schedules themselves have been uneven, and COVID-19 complications have claimed bits and pieces of schedules around the country, we’re nearly halfway through the men’s college basketball calendar. We’re starting to figure out which teams are legit and which are dicey. It’s a good time for a pulse check.
The concept of placing teams into tiers certainly isn’t novel, but it does feel like a much more useful approach than trying to rank then even more arbitrarily, based on incomplete and varied results. Between my own eye test and the help of heaps of data—most teams have played more than 10 games now—at least we can see trends and make inferences.