Late last season, the Mountain West Conference rose up to have the top average RPI in the nation. Andy Glockner of Sports Illustrated had a brilliant article explaining why this happened. Essentially the RPI favors power conferences where the home teams dominate, and the MWC teams were the best in the nation at winning at home last year. (For those that care about the math behind this, skip to the end of this post.)

Second, the RPI of MWC teams was boosted by Wyoming. A good team in November and December, but when Luke Martinez was kicked off the team for an off-court incident, Wyoming simply couldn’t score. And the RPI wasn’t smart enough realize that Wyoming was a bad team in January and February.

Finally, the other big factor in the MWC’s great RPI was that the bottom of the league was remarkably strong. Traditional power Nevada was the league’s bottom-feeder and even Nevada wasn’t a terrible team last season. The Wolfpack won at Washington in December.

All in all, it was a perfect storm that made the MWC seem like a dominant league, at least in the RPI’s eyes. The margin-of-victory systems thought the league was good too, but not nearly as dominant as what the RPI thought. And as is usually the case, the margin-of-victory metrics had the better forecast. In the NCAA tournament, MWC champion New Mexico lost in the first round to Harvard, and the rest of the league struggled as well.

Unfortunately for fans of the MWC, there is no reason to expect any of those factors to repeat this year. Home teams probably won’t win at a disproportionate rate. Wyoming won’t be dominant and then bad. And the bottom of the league will be bad again. (With San Jose St. coming aboard and Air Force rebuilding behind a bunch of 2-star recruits, a drop-off at the bottom of the league is almost unavoidable). Five teams might be in the conversation for the NCAA tournament, but a year after dominating the regular season, it wouldn’t be out of the question for the league to get only two bids.

Here is my lineup-based prediction model's projections for the league in 2013-14:

For column heading definitions, click here.

New Mexico: New Mexico returns four starters (Alex Kirk, Cameron Bairstow, Kendall Williams, and Hugh Greenwood) from last year’s conference winning squad. And they added Cullen Neal who has only recently risen up into ESPNU Top 100. That starting lineup should be competitive with any team in the country. But the team has little proven depth. (Will Kansas transfer Merv Lindsay contribute?) And since this is Craig Neal’s first head coaching job, there are questions of whether he can lead a team to a league title in his first year. The MWC spends as much on coaching as the traditional power leagues, and opposing coaches will heavily scout the Lobos. Will Neal be ready?

Boise St.: I’ve seen a lot of people with Boise St. in their Top 25 and I understand the logic. This was a good team last year and they bring back 91% of their minutes from last season. But my model has them a little bit lower because there are still some real question marks. In particular, Boise St.’s primary offense was a 4-guard lineup last year. But a number of the guards they played simply weren’t very good. Mikey Thompson, Igor Hadziomerovic, and Joe Hanstad were big drains on the offense because of their turnovers and/or bad shooting. If I could say with confidence those three would be relegated to the bench this season, it would be a no-brainer to put Boise St. in the Top 25. But Boise St. isn’t bringing in any can’t miss prospects to ensure that this happens.

Realistically the team will probably hope to get more out of some of its forwards. JUCO transfer James Webb, red-shirt freshman Edmund Dukulis, incoming freshman Nick Duncan, and seldom-used Darrious Hamilton or Vukasin Vujovic will probably get a chance to play more post minutes next year. If they can earn time, the taller lineup might help improve the defense some. But none of them have particularly high expectations either.

Leon Rice is doing a fantastic job, and the expectation for this team should absolutely be the NCAA tournament. But on paper, there are still too many lineup questions to view Boise St. as a clear Top 25 team.

Utah St.: Most people probably won’t have Utah St. this high because of how they ended their tenure in the WAC conference. To finish  11-7 in that league which really only had three good teams was pretty disappointing. But that completely overlooks what happened last year. In mid-January, Utah St. lost its too most efficient players in Preston Medlin and Kyisean Reed. And both were relatively high usage players too, they weren’t just role players. Those type of injuries are devastating at that point in the season and Utah St. could never really recover in conference play.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like Reed will be back. He went through senior day festivities and I haven’t heard any news that he will apply for an extra hardship year. But the return of Medlin from injury should instantly upgrade the offense.

And Utah St. is once again very mature. The team can put together an 8-man lineup with one sophomore, two juniors, and five seniors. The fact that the team doesn’t need to break in a lot of freshmen should help the offense click. Add to that the fact that Stew Morrill has been one of the most under-rated offensive coaches in the nation, and Utah St. will be good again. They might not win the MWC this year, but they will absolutely be close to the top.

UNLV: Click here for a more detailed preview of UNLV.

San Diego St.: JJ O’Brien and Xavier Thames are solid players. And I can write down a seven or eight player rotation for San Diego St. that sounds reasonably intimidating on paper.  But San Diego St. loses its two most important players in Chase Tapley and Jamaal Franklin. Both took a high volume of shots, played a ton of minutes, and were super efficient. (Departing senior DeShawn Stephens rarely shot, but he was very efficient too.) Losing players like that just isn’t a recipe for a better season. And San Diego St. had only the 36th best margin-of-victory last year. 

The recent addition of Tulane graduate transfer Josh Davis helps a lot. Davis was an unbelievably dominant forward without much help around him. And incoming freshman Dakarai Allen also has high expectations. But expecting those two to do better than Tapley and Franklin seems like a little bit of a stretch.

To truly make the NCAA tournament, San Diego St. is going to need more out of Winston Shepherd, Dwayne Polee, and James Johnson. All three were Top 100 recruits out of high school, but none of them has posted an ORtg above 100 yet. (And Johnson played a rather distressing four minutes per game last year.) Unless a couple of those players break out rather unexpectedly, San Diego St. will have a hard time making a fifth straight NCAA tournament.

Wyoming and Fresno St: The best thing you can say about Wyoming and Fresno St. is that they will probably be competitive defensively. Wyoming head coach Larry Shyatt has produced Top 100 defenses in back-to-back years. After how poorly Henry Schroyer’s defenses did over the previous four years, Shyatt at least has his team working hard. Similarly Rodney Terry orchestrated a remarkable defensive turnaround this least season. Fresno St.’s adjusted defense fell from 101.3 to 93.2.

Offensively, it is harder to be optimistic, but here are a couple of points on the two teams. In Wyoming’s case freshman Josh Adams was dreadful. Larry Shyatt clearly thought he was valuable giving him major minutes throughout the season, but Adams was a terrible shooter. Adams will be better as a sophomore, but he was only a 2-star player, and it isn’t clear that he has a very high ceiling. If Wyoming would limit Adams shot selection, the offense could take more of a bump.

In Fresno St.’s case, prized recruit Robert Upshaw was also awful, but he was hampered by injuries all year. If he is fully healthy from the start of the year, he could improve significantly. And the addition of elite transfer recruit Cezar Guerrero should also help. But with few above average efficiency players returning, Fresno St.’s offense will still likely be below average.

Nevada: David Carter has proven to be a poor defensive coach. And after making the tournament four years in a row, Nevada now hasn’t been to the tournament in six years. I feel bad for Deonte Burton (and to a lesser extent Jerry Evans). Burton is a fabulous PG, but he just doesn’t have a lot of quality offensive players to feed the ball to. And with the team exerting no effort on defense, Nevada won’t score enough points to win consistently.

Colorado St.: Colorado St. is poised for a hard fall this year. It isn’t just that Colorado St. loses 5 starters. Returning only 27% of the team’s minutes is bad enough. But the team also loses all its high volume shooters. The returning players like Daniel Bejarano and Gerson Santo were efficient last year, but they also deferred a lot in last year’s offense. The model is skeptical they can maintain their efficiency when asked to shoot more. That is why the model projects Colorado St. to have one of the biggest offensive collapses of any team in the country this off-season. The team also doesn’t add any can’t miss recruits. The team adds two JUCO transfers, which should help, and Dwight Smith will be back from an injury. But with all that roster attrition, the best case scenario is probably a season like Vanderbilt had last year.

Air Force: Dave Pilipovich did a fantastic job in his first season with the team, but Air Force is a very hard place to win. To return just one-third of the team’s minutes from last year and try to create a winning team with only 2-star recruits is a major undertaking.

San Jose St.: San Jose St. returns only four scholarship players from last year. When you don’t have enough quality upperclassman at San Jose St., the odds of winning are slim to none.

And now the math based reason that the RPI favors conferences where the home team wins. (Again I am just lifting this idea from Andy Glockner.)

Imagine there are just three games, a neutral site non-conference game which the power conference team wins, and then two conference games home and road, which are split. Under the RPI formula, the neutral site win counts as 1 win. But how the W-L split is counted will depend on where the win and loss happen. If the home team wins both, the weight is 0.6, if the road team wins both, the weight is 1.4. So if the home team wins both, the W-L record will be 1.6 and 0.6. If road teams win, the W-L record will be 2.4 and 1.4. The former works out to a 73 percent winning percentage, the later works out to a 63 percent winning percentage. Even though the venues, opponents, and W-L records are the same, the RPI gives higher credit to the league where the home team dominates.

Amusingly, in bad leagues that don’t win many non-conference games, the RPI ratings will be higher if the road teams win more conference games.

The game of the weekend featured Baylor ending Kentucky’s 55-game home winning streak. I’ve often described Scott Drew as an excellent recruiter, but without the in-season coaching ability of John Calipari. But for at least one afternoon, Scott Drew’s club ended up on top.

A couple of things fascinated me about the game.

First, John Calipari had Kyle Wiltjer on the bench for a long stretch in the second half. And he really had no choice. Wiltjer finished the day 1-for-11 from the floor, and he doesn’t have the defensive ability to stay in the game if his shot isn’t falling. Wiltjer has to find ways to provide value to his team other than just knocking down threes if he is going to be a true leader this season.

Second, I continued to be impressed with the all-around game of Baylor’s Isaiah Austin. I wish he would settle for a few less outside shots, but what I love about Austin is how he always looks extremely focused when on the floor. Even if he commits a turnover or takes a dumb shot, Austin doesn’t ever appear to get rattled.

Of course it is easy to describe an intangible like “quiet confidence” when a player is winning. And with Kentucky losing, it is easy to attack Nerlens Noel’s complete lack of an offensive game. But had Kentucky rallied to win, we’d instead be talking about all the little things Noel did to help his team win on Saturday. Noel had 16 rebounds and 6 steals in Kentucky’s loss, and Kentucky needed those defensive stops in a game where they shot so poorly. Watching so many freshmen play prominent roles made me want to do a quick update of how all the top recruits have fared this season. Here is a summary of the RSCI Top 80.  * = injured or ineligible for part of the season

Kentucky has had a problem with rebounding this year, but don’t blame Nerlens Noel. He needs some help from Willie-Cauley Stein and Kyle Wiltjer who are very poor defensive rebounders for their size.

If Kaleb Tarczewski and Steven Adams aren’t earning major minutes at this point in the season, it is hard to envisioning them becoming full scale stars later. When conference play rolls around, coaches tend to be less patient with their freshmen. Thus in many ways, percentage of minutes can be the most important stat this time of year.

Efficiency is also important, and Kyle Anderson’s 87.9 ORtg is terrible for an elite recruit. Point guards can struggle more than other players to adapt to the college game and Anderson was considered to have point guard skills out of high school. So perhaps Anderson’s struggles aren’t a complete surprise. On the other hand, Archie Goodwin and Marcus Smart weren’t really point guards in high school and they have adapted to the position. Goodwin’s turnover numbers are far too high, but he’s set up his teammates passably while setting up his own shot a lot. And Marcus Smart has made a tremendous transition to playing the point-guard position at the college level. Smart’s assist rate is much better than many players regarded as better passers out of high school.

I really think the problem with Anderson is that Ben Howland hasn’t figured out how to use him. Lots of coaches from Rick Pitino to John Thompson III have been able to feature great lanky passers, by positioning them at the high post and letting them see the whole floor. Anderson still has the potential to be that type of player, even if he has struggled early.

Grant Jerrett and Sam Dekker are the only players in the Top 20 who are not starting. Ricardo Ledo is ineligible. And Kris Dunn and Gary Harris are injured.

We start to see the typical drop-off when we get to recruits in the 11-20 range. DaJuan Coleman still has the profile of a player who will be a star in a future season, but right now he is having trouble earning playing time behind other quality big men on Syracuse’s roster. Meanwhile Cameron Ridley has been extremely disappointing for Texas. Certainly it hurts not to have Myck Kabongo eligible, but Kabongo’s absence doesn’t explain why a player like Ridley can be so passive against a team like Chaminade as he was in the Maui Invitational loss. The only good thing I can say about Ridley is that he has 19 blocks already, which is more than any other player in the Top 50 except Nerlens Noel.

Only Rasheed Sulaimon has become an undisputed crunch time star for his team. And Sulaimon’s efficiency is even more impressive when you look at Duke’s strength of schedule so far. Rodney Purvis has also played major minutes, but he is deferring a lot to his teammates at this point.

Glenn Robinson has been shockingly efficient at this point in the season, well above many of his peers on this list. But none of the players listed here are going to quite be in the national player of the year discussion because they are starting to become more passive offensive players. (I.e. the percentage of possessions used is now often below 20%) Only Danuel House is using a large number of possessions at this point in the rankings, and House plays for a Houston team that is in the process of upgrading its talent level in anticipation of joining the Big East.

This preseason I wrote how Marcus Paige would have some growing pains and be inconsistent this year, and the response I got was that Roy Williams had a ton of confidence in Paige and that I was being un-necessarily pessimistic. So far, with an 87.7 ORtg, neither Paige nor the Tar Heels are off to a great start. Paige has better days ahead, but North Carolina is also going to have a few more baffling losses before the season is over.

I was worried that Yogi Ferrell could have a similar negative impact on the Hoosiers because freshmen are often inconsistent. But Ferrell has thrived because he has worked within the offense. Instead of hogging the ball and needing to create shots, Ferrell has let his teammates work their isolation stuff, and provided key drives and dishes when needed. Ferrell has been happy to fill a role on the Hoosiers, and he has been everything Indiana needed.

Finally, Tony Parker’s minutes this year have been a joke, but with Josh Smith transferring, Parker at least has a chance of cracking the UCLA rotation now.

Notice how often a lack of playing time plagues players at this point in the rankings. I expected and still expect big things out of Kansas’ Perry Ellis and Iowa’s Adam Woodbury, but their coaches have only given them a taste of playing time at this point. The result is that some guys at this point in the rankings become unmitigated gunners. Hey Indiana’s Jeremy Hollowell, no matter how good you think you are, when the game with North Carolina was close late in the first half, Indiana didn’t want you bombing threes. They wanted Jordan Hulls bombing threes.

Xavier has played much better than many of us anticipated this season, and freshman Semaj Christon deserves a lot of that credit. Christon has out-played point-guards like Marcus Paige and realistically he’s been much more important than even Yogi Ferrell given his role in the offense. Christon is using nearly 30% of his team’s possessions, scoring at a prolific clip, and setting up his teammates without a rash of turnovers.

Most of Christopher Opekpa’s stats are pretty pedestrian, but not his block rate. Opekpa has 35 blocks at this point in the season, easily out-distancing any of the other freshmen in today’s column.

Nik Stauskas has been unbelievably efficient at this point and he is playing major minutes to boot. Some people expected Michigan to be a Top 10 team, but did they really expect Stauskas to outperform his peer level players by this much? His efficiency is due in large part to his teammates, and his shot-selection. But his performance is still notable. Stauskas has the most threes of anyone mentioned in this column (18 made) beating even UCLA’s super-aggressive shooter Jordan Adams.

Also give Adams credit. He’s shooting 26% of the time while maintaining a solid ORtg. Kyle Anderson may have been the third rated recruit for UCLA, but Adams has actually played like one.

Follow @DanHanner

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.