Andrew Wiggins is expected to make his college decision on Tuesday afternoon. Assuming the announcement is not leaked on Monday, I plan to post an updated Top 25 around 7pm ET on Tuesday evening. Even if Wiggins commits to Kentucky, the numbers below will not change substantially. The Wildcats are already projected as the No. 1 team in the nation and Kentucky is deep enough that another elite recruit won’t dramatically change the team’s outlook.

But this week I wanted to focus on the SEC because two other key decisions have already happened. First, Florida added Rutgers transfer Eli Carter. Second, it was announced that Tennessee guard Trae Golden will not return next year. With that news, here is how my lineup-based model projects the SEC standings to shake out next year:

For a list of column definitions, click here.

Kentucky: Even if Kentucky is young, I completely agree with the model’s conclusion that this is the No. 1 team in the nation. The roster is full of instant impact Top 20 recruits, and even if a few don’t pan out, there is so much depth that it won’t matter. Probably the only place where Kentucky doesn’t have great depth is the back-court, so only an injury or poor play by Andrew or Aaron Harrison could derail the team’s season.

But let’s not get carried away with the undefeated talk either. Even if SEC basketball is in a down period, there are enough quality teams and differences in styles of play that the odds still favor the Wildcats tripping up a few times in conference play.

Florida: There seems to be a clear consensus that Kentucky, Louisville, and Michigan St. are the top three teams in the nation. But this week Florida added Rutger’s transfer Eli Carter. And while there is no guarantee that Carter should be eligible immediately, if the Arsalan Kazemi situation is any indication, I think there is a good chance Carter will be eligible to play next season. After the mistreatment of players at Rutgers, I think the NCAA will be hesitant to turn down a waiver request. And since Eli Carter gives the Gators another perimeter scorer (one of the team’s only question-markets), the model now likes them to jump ahead of Louisville for third nationally.

And looking at the roster, I cannot help but agree. Florida goes two deep at basically every position. There is basically no downside risk for this roster. Is Scottie Wilbekin or Top 10 recruit Kasey Hill the better PG. It doesn’t matter, they can play together. Should they be joined by hot-shooting Michael Frazier or Eli Carter? And what about the front-court? Will Top 20 recruit Chris Walker and South Carolina transfer Damontre Harris be able to earn playing time with Patrick Young and Will Yeguete coming back? And Casey Prather and Virginia Tech transfer Dorian Finney-Smith are plenty good too. Honestly, who is the weakest player in that 10-man rotation? All 10 of those guys are SEC-caliber starters. Is it any wonder why DeVon Walker and Cody Larson transferred out? They weren’t even going to have a chance to play this year.

Alabama: Alabama point-guard Trevor Releford remains a true star and Levi Randolph is still becoming one. But the biggest improvement should be in the front-court. With former #22 recruit Devonta Pollard becoming a sophomore, I expect a big jump in his efficiency. It will help that Pollard will be joined in the front-court by Top 100 recruits Jimmy Taylor and Shannon Hale. The team also adds a JUCO transfer Algie Key. Combine that talent with Anthony Grant’s ability to teach defense and you have a solid NCAA tournament team. Before Trevor Lacey transferred, I had Alabama in the preseason Top 25.

Tennessee: This week Tennessee lost PG Trae Golden. While the university cannot issue a formal statement, it is likely he is leaving because of academic issues. Cuonzo Martin went on the offensive with reporters and tried to claim that his team’s expectations shouldn’t slip without Golden. But that is ludicrous. Golden had an ORtg of 110 and 107 the last two seasons and that kind of veteran offensive efficiency at the PG spot is very hard to replace. The team is now projected to start unranked freshman point-guard Darius Thompson and I project Thompson to have an ORtg of 97. No matter what Cuonzo Martin says, freshmen simply make more turnovers and mistakes. Overall, Tennessee’s offensive projection drops from 115 to 109 thanks to Golden’s departure. Like Alabama, Tennessee fell out of my preseason Top 25.

LSU: Second year head coach Johnny Jones has upgraded the quality of recruiting with Top 100 players Jarrell Martin, Jordan Mickey, and Tim Quarterman joining the fold. He has also added JUCO transfer John Odo to provide size in the paint, just in case Mickey and Martin aren’t ready to lead from day one. And that added talent should help high volume shooter and high potential forward Johnny O’Bryant improve his efficiency. With Anthony Hickey returning to man the PG slot and Andre Stringer knocking down threes, LSU has a solid rotation on paper. But LSU is still a bubble team. And with all those new players playing major minutes, expect some puzzling losses at times this season.

Vanderbilt: A year after losing everyone to graduation, Vanderbilt returns their entire rotation. The team also adds Top 100 recruit Damian Jones and Tulsa transfer Eric McCllelan. With some normal player development, Vanderbilt will be better. But Kedren Johnson is the only player who looks like he might be a star.

Arkansas: With Hunter Mickelson transferring and Marshawn Powell and BJ Young declaring for the draft, it sure feels like Arkansas is headed in the wrong direction. And with Young departing, the team has a glaring need at PG. Arkansas made a play for Rutgers transfer Jerome Seagers but Seagers chose Auburn. Probably the only thing that could make Razorbacks fans feel worse than losing three key players unexpectedly was losing out on a player to Auburn. Still, if you are expecting Arkansas to fall off the map, the recruiting class will probably stop that from happening. Bobby Portis is an instant impact recruit in the post, and Moses Kingsley will provide some key minutes as well. Houston transfer Alandise Harris will also chip in this season. And Mike Anderson is a solid coach. But the recent string of departures is disheartening.

Ole Miss: The back-court of Marshall Henderson and Jarvis Summers is back but the other three starters are gone. And without a slew of elite recruits (either new or incumbent on the roster), replacing those missing players will be difficult. In the front court, the return of DeMarco Cox may help, but he is the kind of player that never shoots the basketball unless wide-open, and coming off an injury he certainly does not project as a big-time scorer. The same can be said for Aaron Jones who was also rather passive last season. And that means unranked freshmen recruits like Dwight Coleby and Sebastian Saiz will play more than Andy Kennedy would probably like.

Last season was head coach Andy Kennedy’s best defensive season of his career. But Murphy Holloway, the team’s best ball thief, and Reginald Buckner, the team’s best shot-blocker, are gone. And unless they can duplicate that kind of defensive performance, they probably won’t have enough offense to make the NCAA tournament. Aaron Jones was a solid shot-blocker in limited minutes last season, so another strong defensive season is possible, but certainly not probable.

Missouri: While Missouri can put together a pretty solid rotation of 7 players, the team will struggle to replace so many star players. PG Wes Clark is a Top 100 recruit and he will start from Day 1, but he is no Phil Pressey. Johnathan Williams is another Top 100 recruit and JUCO transfer Keanau Post was a Top 10 JUCO player. But neither projects at Laurence Bowers or Alex Oriakhi’s level. Perhaps the only player who can match last year’s quality is Tulsa transfer Jordan Clarkson who can probably match what Keion Bell brought to the team last year. But if Missouri is going to have any chance of matching last year, they are going to need one of the three returning players to step up their game. And while Earnest Ross and Tony Criswell will be nice pieces, the player most likely to break out is Jabari Brown. Brown was a Top 20 recruit out of high school, and joined the team mid-season last year. With a full fall of games under his belt, perhaps Brown can reach that next level. But his development won’t make up for what the team loses. And given Frank Haith’s struggles at teaching defense, the tournament seems unlikely.

Auburn: I’m assuming Rutgers transfer Jerome Seagers will get a waiver to play right away. Seagers and Virginia transfer KT Harrell will join Chris Denson and Jordan Price to form a passable SEC back-court. But the lack of talent in the front-court will keep this team near the bottom of the SEC.

Texas A&M: PG Fabyon Harris and forward Kourtney Roberson are fantastic players. But the rest of the roster is hideously inefficient. Normally I’d talk about how former Top 100 recruits Alex Caruso and J-Mychal Reese are poised for a breakout sophomore season. But after they posted ORtgs of 88 and 83 last year, it would take a minor miracle for them to become dependable players next season. And Florida St. transfer Antwan Space looked ill-equipped to play major college ball in his short time at that school too.

South Carolina:  My model still loves what Frank Martin did at Kansas St. He was a consistent winner, and other than his first season, he did it without a roster full of elite talent.  This Post & Courier story about the night SC’s Brenton Williams scored 38 points summed up Martin’s views perfectly. “My whole thing is, I don’t care what your talent level is. That’s irrelevant to me. I don’t care if you have 96 stars. I don’t care if somebody rated you a 99… I watch guys play 50 times over a course of a year, including summer basketball, and I still don’t know if they’re good enough. How people can watch somebody play three times and determine whether they’re a three-star, four-star, I don’t get that. I don’t care how many stars you’ve got. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care what your talent level is. Bring some positive energy every day.” Martin inherited a rag-tag bunch of players that went 2-14 the previous year and believed he could win with that group because he had done it before. But last year a coach who had never had a defensive performance outside the top 50, suddenly coached a team to the 228^th best defense in the nation. His team was hard-nosed and physical as always, committing fouls at a record pace. But unlike most seasons, that didn’t translate to a hard-nosed two-point defense. Instead of fouling to stop lay-ups, South Carolina fouled and allowed lay-ups. 

The real problem was the lack of size and depth in the front-court. Michael Carrera was an under-sized rebounding machine (much like Colorado St.’s Pierce Hornung), but he wasn’t the type of guy who could anchor the defense. It hurt the team that Carlton Geathers was injured. It also hurt that RJ Slawson could never live up to Frank Martin’s high expectations. (I wasn’t even remotely shocked to see that Slawson transferred this off-season) But that meant the focus had to be on freshmen front-court players, and they weren’t ready.

Bruce Ellington (when he returns from football), Sindarius Thornwell (the top 100 recruit), Ty Johnson (the mid-season Villanova transfer who struggled mightily for Jay Wright), and Brenton Williams (efficient but as Martin put it “he might be slower than me”) all provide something. And ideally Carrera could play more minutes at small-forward (at least defensively). But the 5 other players competing for time in the front-court have nearly equivalently low expectations. And that means no matter what Frank Martin has accomplished in the past, the turnaround will take time.

Georgia: When Georgia hired Mark Fox, I thought he was a great hire. But with Gerald Robinson graduating and Ketavious Caldwell-Pope leaving in the draft, there is literally nothing left. There are no Top 100 recruits left on the roster. There are no obvious stars.

Mississippi St.: Everyone is back. But last year’s team was so horrible that even with substantial improvement on offense and defense, this is still by far the worst team in the SEC.

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Ken Pomeroy and I released our rankings this week. If for some reason you haven’t reached your fill of geek week material yet, allow me a few additional words.

Why I Gave Up Returning Minutes

This April, I used a returning minutes model and foolishly predicted that Vanderbilt would be an upper-division SEC team. But I'm not alone. Ken Pomeroy’s model just generated the same result. He has Vanderbilt at 9-9 and in 6th place in the 14 team SEC. Clearly we both needed to “watch more games” and “do some research”.

But actually, what we needed was a better model. A key limitation of a returning minutes model is that it assumes that teams that lose a certain value of player all fall the same amount. And because of averaging, there is essentially a limit to how far any team can drop in a given year. Vanderbilt lost its entire rotation, dropped quite a bit in both models, but was still pegged to stay in the top half of the SEC.

Similarly Wichita St. lost 5 of the 7 players in its rotation and will clearly be having a rebuilding year. But in Ken Pomeroy’s current projections the Shockers are 46th in the nation and projected to finish in 2nd in the MVC. Wichita St.’s prediction is so disconcerting it kept Ken awake at night.

And as I stared at teams like Vanderbilt and Wichita St. this spring, I knew that their predictions were built on a house of cards. There simply weren’t the players in the lineup to support that strong a ranking for these teams. And so I began the process of developing a player-based, lineup-based model.

I decided we need to change the question from, “How many minutes does a team have coming back?” to “Who is likely to step into the lineup?” If the answer is a host of freshmen, then we should be very concerned. If the answer is some JUCO players, we should be concerned but maybe expect a smoother transition. If the answer is a bunch of transfers (see Iowa St. last year), we should be less concerned. If the answer is a bunch of bench players who stunk last year, we should be concerned. If the answer is a bunch of bench players who were extremely efficient in their limited playing time, we should be more optimistic.

And when you actually look at who Kevin Stallings is planning to use to supplement his lineup at Vanderbilt, I think there are real questions. Stallings did not bring in any elite recruits. He did not bring in any JUCO players to stem-the-tide. He did not bring in any D1 transfers. What he is basically leaning on is one efficient player (Josh Henderson), and three former Top 100 recruits who have a lot of potential, but who have been extremely underwhelming statistically in limited minutes (Ron Odom, Kedren Johnson, Dai-Jon Parker). That’s simply not enough to generate a seven or eight-player rotation that should be able to compete in the upper division in the SEC.

And if you look at the big discrepancies between Ken’s model and mine, differences in who will step into the lineup explain almost all of those. I have Butler, Missouri, UCLA, USC and Utah meaningfully higher because of transfers. And I have Vanderbilt, Wichita St. and Penn significantly lower because of meaningful questions about who will step into the lineup for those programs.

But there is another key point here. Coaches are not idiots. They can see what they have, and they will do their best to try to fill weaknesses. Remember those three high potential players I listed above for Vanderbilt (Ron Odom, Kedren Johnson, and Dai-Jon Parker). If Kevin Stallings had seen those guys in practice last year and saw that they were going to be woefully underprepared this season, he would have presumably hit the recruiting trail a lot harder this off-season. Coaches know what they have, and the last thing they want to do is spend a season being embarrassed on the basketball court.

So maybe there is something to the idea that Vanderbilt does have a typical, expected level of replacement player available. It would not surprise me if looking at the player level is unnecessarily pessimistic. Sure no one in the Vandy lineup is a guaranteed star, but there might be more there than what my model believes.

Even in a situation where I’m pretty sure the returning minutes model is far too optimistic, the true answer may very well lie somewhere in the middle. And that is why there is always value in different predictions models and independent evaluations of the information.

A Pair of Bubble Teams

I feel like the lineup projections may sound too vague at this point, but allow me to illustrate the results with a couple of bubble teams. One team that seems to be perennially on the bubble is Ole Miss. With four starters back, two strong JC players joining the team, and a solid offensive coach, Ole Miss players should be more efficient across the board this year.

Only forward Terrence Henry leaves the team. His minutes will likely be replaced by Demarco Cox. That’s a nice upgrade because Henry was not a terribly efficient player and Cox has high potential as a Top 100 recruit out of high school. Aaron Jones is unlikely to see his minutes increase substantially because he is such a passive offensive player, but he is another option in the paint. The more likely scenario is that JUCO transfer Jason Carter will also take some of Henry’s minutes.

Marshall Henderson, one of the top JUCO players in the nation is probably even a little under-rated in this evaluation, but he too will help supplement the offense. And the Rebels will not have to give too many minutes to freshmen. The model projects Derrick Millinghaus will spell Jarvis Summers at PG here, but the rest of the lineup is so strong, the other freshmen may have to wait.

Mississippi’s offense is expected to improve from 104.1 to 109.5 which is a substantial improvement. The team doesn’t have any superstars, but there is enough offensive balance to still be very good. So why aren’t the Rebels a lock for the NCAA tournament? The real problem is Andy Kennedy’s defense. In his career, Kennedy has never been able to achieve a defense better than 62nd in the nation, and the model expects something similar this season.

On the flip side, Purdue’s offense is really starting to slip at this point. Purdue loses the three players with the most minutes last season, and all three were vital to the offense. Terone Johnson played the most minutes of any returning player and he is an obvious starter along with DJ Byrd who was a dominant three point shooter last season. Travis Carroll also projects as a starter.

But after that the freshmen are going to have to play. AJ Hammons and Ronnie Johnson were consensus Top 100 recruits and look like natural starters at center and point guard.  But they will make a lot of mistakes playing this much in year one. And then we really get to the uncertain underclassmen. It is hard to imagine that Robbie Hummel, JaJuan Johnson, and E’Twaun Moore were once part of the same recruiting haul, because Matt Painter has really run into problems finding quality pieces to replace those players. Looking at last year’s pair of freshmen, Anthony Johnson struggled shooting the ball, and his poor free throw percentage suggests he has no natural touch. And Jacob Lawson was terribly weak in the paint. The rest of this year’s freshmen are just too far down the recruiting rankings to expect efficiency in year one.

(Final Note: The only scholarship player not listed for Purdue, Sandi Marcius, just doesn’t look like a Big Ten player based on his last two seasons of statistics.)

If Purdue’s defense is as bad as last year, they won’t even be in the NCAA tournament discussion. But defense has traditionally been Matt Painters calling card. I expect Purdue’s defense to improve enough to keep the team in the NCAA hunt, but the offense just has too many question marks to predict an NCAA bid at this point.

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The older I get, the more I see that one of the things I love most about sports is the variety of it, the diversity of it and the CHARACTERS. Men’s tennis is at its best in many years because, for the first time in a long time, the top three or four players all have wildly different styles. The Tim Tebow story was fun on so many levels, but one of those levels was that he was just SO DIFFERENT in how he played — I’d say we are entering a great time for quarterbacks, because Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers and Eli Manning and Drew Brees and Michael Vick and Cam Newton and Tebow and others are not really alike at all.

-- Joe Posnanski

As a basketball fan, I’ve never understood the division that exists between fans of the NBA and the NCAA. While the NBA has the best basketball players in the world, March Madness is compelling in its own right and as entertaining as anything that happens on the professional level.

In the NBA, the owners of the 30 franchises consider turning a profit and getting an equal shot at the top players a right, regardless of how well (or how poorly) they run their organization and the respective size of their fan-bases. Since every losing team is a few ping pong balls from the rights to a LeBron James, Kevin Durant or Dwight Howard, personnel determines scheme in the NBA.

In contrast, the vast majority of the 344 Division I programs in college basketball have little chance of ever receiving a commitment from a McDonald’s All-American. But instead of petulantly trying to sabotage the sport in a misguided effort to legislate fairness, schools try many creative ways of leveraging the talents of the players they can recruit. As a result, scheme determines personnel in the NCAA.

At Syracuse, Jim Boeheim has made a Hall of Fame career out of running a contrarian scheme, in his case an aggressive 2-3 zone. The Orange traditionally have rosters full of “1.5’s”, 6’3+ combo guards lacking the quickness to defend elite PG’s and the size to defend SG’s, and “3.5’s”, 6’8+ combo forwards lacking the quickness to defend elite SF’s and the size to defend PF’s. However, because Syracuse never plays man defense, the athletic deficiencies of their players are minimized.

So while nearly every NBA team runs a fairly similar system of isolations, pick-and-rolls and man defense, an incredibly diverse array of styles can be found in the college game. On one end of the spectrum, teams like Missouri play four guards and pressure the ball 94 feet for 48 minutes, on the other, teams like Wisconsin run a deliberate motion offense, trying to minimize the number of possessions and shoot at the very end of the shot-clock.

In the NBA, the players are too good for the “40 Minutes of Hell” system (which Mike Anderson has brought to Missouri and Arkansas in the last few years) to be successful. Like Mike Leach’s bizarre pass-happy offense in college football, Anderson’s system, which he learned as a member of Nolan Richardson’s staff in Arkansas in the 1990’s, has philosophical holes that professional athletes can exploit. Nevertheless, that doesn’t make them any less entertaining on the collegiate level.

And with 68 teams set to compete in the NCAA Tournament, there are a lot more surprises in the college game. Even programs ranked in the top-15 like Murray State have barely been on national TV this season.

We have a pretty good idea of how teams like the Pacers and the 76ers match up with the top of the Eastern Conference but not whether an undersized Murray State squad can handle the size of an elite team from a Power Six conference. It’s an open question how Isaiah Canaan’s speed and athleticism translates outside of the Ohio Valley Conference. Non-conference play in college basketball generally ends in late December, so it’s almost impossible to gauge how younger teams like Texas, Washington and Tennessee who have found their groove in the last two months will fare in March.

In the NBA, it’s hard to envision a scenario where Chicago, Miami and Oklahoma City aren’t three of the final four teams left in the playoffs. In the NCAA, as many as two dozen teams have a legitimate shot at making a run at the Final Four.

Of course, in terms of entertainment, none of this makes the NCAA necessarily better or worse than the NBA, just different. But, as Posnanski writes, there’s something to be said for the concept of “different” in the modern sports world. Basketball fans of all stripes should enjoy March Madness; the NBA will still be here in a few weeks.