One of our favorite stat gurus here at Banners is Bart Torvik. The Torvik rankings have appeared alongside Ken Pomeroy’s eponymous KenPom as one of the best measures of a college basketball team and one of the better ways to project an NCAA tournament field as the season goes along. Torvik starts to put data into the next season’s projections as soon as the previous season ends. As transfers go in and out things get tabulated until the first release in April.
That first release of projections has Xavier at #18. That is an enormous jump for a team that finished in the 60s in most computer numbers last season.