NCAA March Madness Program Rankings, 2023 Edition

Yep, it's still Duke

A few years back, a recurring Bob Sturm NFL Super Bowl franchise ranking system inspired me to create a college basketball equivalent. The formula changed a bit in the first couple of seasons based on suggestions from nerds, but the idea remains largely the same.

A recap of the system:

1. The rankings encapsulate every year since the field went to 64 teams in 1985, so there’s now 38 years of data included. (2020 is skipped because of course it’s skipped.) This has helped smooth out some of the bumps along the way and better keep teams with a shorter run of success in a proper placement. Imagine how different these rankings would have been in the mid-1990s; programs like Arkansas and UNLV would be sitting way higher than they do now.

2. The list consists almost exclusively of teams who have made it to a Final Four, because to make the top 25 with a program who never went to the final weekend is pretty unlikely. So far Xavier & Purdue are the only programs I’ve found to accrue enough points to warrant monitoring without making the Final Four. I also track all of the Big 12 schools for the hell of it, but Iowa State, Kansas State, Baylor, and TCU haven’t gotten far enough to do much damage in these rankings. (Baylor did jump 17 spots due to the title, but there’s still a lot of bad years to overcome.)

3. The point system was using the Fibonacci number to retain a relative value for advancing in the tournament. Using 1 point per round unintentionally punished teams who made it further; a team who made the 2nd round got twice the points (2) as a team who lost in the first round (1), but a team who made the Elite Eight (4) only got 1⁄3 more than a Sweet Sixteen team (3). It made the rankings even dumber than they already are, so I went with our sweet Italian math genius’ numbers instead. (Little-known fact, he once wrote a poem about the Mayans even though Italians didn’t know Mayans existed at the time. Why he’s not on the Euro is beyond me.) Then the NCAA expanded to 68 teams and I had to modify it a bit because nothing in life worth doing is easy, especially the things not worth doing.

4. I’m using March Madness as a proxy for program strength as the best teams make the tournament and make runs regularly, but it’s fair to consider there are weaknesses in this measurement. If there was a way to synthesize regular-season achievements into this, I would, but...it sounds like a lot of work so...uhh, here you go.

The point system is as follows:

I should mention these points are not cumulative; a team who wins the national title gets 47 points, not 120.

Without further ado, here are the top-25 rankings after the 2023 NCAA Tournament:

The next 5: Virginia (141 points), Memphis (136), Xavier (128), Cincinnati (120), and Oklahoma State (117).

When in other articles I refer to there only being 4 ‘Blue Bloods’, this chart is a major reason why. Look at the gap between Kentucky and UConn; the Huskies could repeat as national champions next year and still not pass anyone in the top four - though at that point they’ll have a pretty great argument - which is a sizable performance gap even among programs with a ton of history.

You can look at the source data here if you like, including may haphazard attempts at conditional formatting which work much better in Excel than Google Sheets. If you think there’s a school that should be getting tracked feel free to mention it in the comments and I’ll look, but if they haven’t at least made a couple Elite Eights they probably won’t be in the running for a high spot. Here are all of the teams I’ve got in the list right now who aren’t in the top-30, in the order they’re currently ranked in my list:

Butler (115 points)

Georgia Tech (113)

Baylor (107)

Utah (105)

LSU (104)

West Virginia (104)

Iowa State (98)

Missouri (97)

Marquette (93)

Oregon (92)

Stanford (90)

Seton Hall (88)

Tennessee (87)

Texas Tech (87)

Kansas State (84)

St. John's (81)

Auburn (74)

San Diego State (72)

Miami (70)

Providence (68)

Minnesota (66)

VCU (65)

Wichita State (60)

Houston (59)

Miss. St. (54)

Massachusetts (53)

George Mason (34)

South Carolina (30)

Loyola Chicago (28)

Florida Atlantic (21)

TCU (18)

There could be somebody I’m missing who should be in there - I’m tracking 61 teams currently, and there are north of 350 D-I programs now - but I think I’ve got most of the ‘notable’ programs of the last 38 years included.