College basketball is back! And so is T-Rank: my effort to objectively rate all 351 college basketball teams, and project records for every single one of them. Indeed, T-Rank has already made predictions for all 5,000 or so college basketball games on the schedule.
The upshot is that there is a place for more data-driven, formulaic preseason ratings. The AP preseason poll is good because human beings are very good at the kind of fuzzy logic required to take in a bunch of disparate data and form a judgment, so it is worth paying attention to.