Minimum Violations (MinV)
 College Basketball Ranking
 
Current MinV Ranking for the 2004 Season

 At right are the rankings of all NCAA Division 1 college basketball teams thru the games of March 13, 2005 (i.e., all regular season and conference tournament games) using MinV, a model developed by Jay Coleman of the University of North Florida.  MinV generates a ranking that minimizes the number of game score violations -- that is, the number of times a game's winner is ranked behind the team it defeated.  In other words, MinV guarantees the ranking with the best retrodictive accuracy.

The ranking at right results in only 866 violations out of 4675 Division 1-A games, or a violation percentage of 18.52%.

However, due to the very large size of the problem for college basketball, the model was not able to identify the guaranteed minimum violations ranking for this week, after a lengthy processing time.  In other words, the 866 violations may be the best possible solution, but it's not guaranteed (the MinV model did establish that the minimum number of violations could not possibly be lower than 810).

A minimum violations ranking has never before been presented for college basketball (due in part to the extreme computational difficulty involved for a problem with 330 teams).  However, there are literally trillions of different rankings at any given point in time that would yield the same total of 866 violations; the ranking shown is only one of those.

The current MinV ranking for college football can be found here.
 

About the Author

Jay Coleman is the Richard deRaismes Kip Professor of Operations Management & Quantitative Methods in the Coggin College of Business at the University of North Florida.  His research with Allen Lynch (of Mercer University) on modeling the decisions of the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee, first published in the journal Interfaces, has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Investor's Business Daily, the New York Times, the Associated Press, UPI, and USA Today, as well as over 50 other major media outlets, including CNN Headline News, the Sporting News, and CBS SportsLine.  More information about the NCAA Tournament model can be found at DanceCard.unf.edu.  His research with Ken Jennings and Frank McLaughlin on final offer arbitration in professional baseball has been published in Cal-Berkeley's Industrial Relations journal.   
 
Acknowledgements

The author is very grateful to Ken Pomeroy for his invaluable service of providing the game scores used in developing the current ranking.  Kenneth Massey deserves tremendous thanks for compiling and comparing the many different college basketball ranking systems on the web, and for including the MinV ranking on his site.   
 
 

Please forward all comments to jcoleman@unf.edu

Jay Coleman's Home Page

This page last updated on March 20, 2005 at 5:30 p.m.

 
1 Boston College
2 Illinois
3 Wake Forest
4 Gonzaga
5 North Carolina
6 Wisconsin
7 Iowa
8 Oklahoma St.
9 Duke
10 Texas Tech
11 Washington
12 Oklahoma
13 Connecticut
14 Syracuse
15 West Virginia
16 George Washington
17 Villanova
18 Kansas
19 North Carolina St.
20 Central Florida
21 Georgia Tech
22 Kentucky
23 Pacific
24 Arizona
25 Miami FL
26 Texas El Paso
27 Utah St.
28 Arizona St.
29 Louisville
30 Michigan St.
31 Ohio
32 Cincinnati
33 Stanford
34 Northern Iowa
35 Texas A&M
36 UCLA
37 Bowling Green
38 Iowa St.
39 Oregon
40 Southwest Missouri St.
41 New Mexico
42 Texas
43 Kansas St.
44 Utah
45 Denver
46 Louisiana St.
47 Florida
48 Alabama
49 Miami OH
50 Mississippi St.
51 Buffalo
52 Vanderbilt
53 Toledo
54 Nevada
55 Wisconsin Milwaukee
56 Hawaii
57 Vermont
58 Southern California
59 St. Mary's
60 San Diego
61 Arkansas Little Rock
62 Charlotte
63 Pepperdine
64 Louisiana Lafayette
65 Nevada Las Vegas
66 Southern Illinois
67 UAB
68 Clemson
69 Rice
70 Wyoming
71 Creighton
72 Maryland
73 Wichita St.
74 Illinois St.
75 Virginia
76 Drake
77 Western Kentucky
78 Bradley
79 Bucknell
80 Northwestern
81 DePaul
82 Pittsburgh
83 Texas A&M Corpus Chris
84 Notre Dame
85 Old Dominion
86 South Carolina
87 Arkansas
88 Hofstra
89 Minnesota
90 Texas Christian
91 Marquette
92 Missouri
93 Ohio St.
94 San Francisco
95 Southern Methodist
96 Houston
97 Indiana
98 Nebraska
99 Saint Joseph's
100 Baylor
101 Oral Roberts
102 Colorado
103 California
104 Washington St.
105 Oregon St.
106 Portland
107 Loyola Marymount
108 Winthrop
109 Providence
110 Temple
111 Ball St.
112 Georgetown
113 Memphis
114 Purdue
115 Seton Hall
116 Western Michigan
117 Detroit
118 Eastern Kentucky
119 Kent St.
120 Loyola Chicago
121 Dayton
122 Evansville
123 Northern Illinois
124 Wisconsin Green Bay
125 Akron
126 Illinois Chicago
127 Wright St.
128 Northeastern
129 Massachusetts
130 Niagara
131 Florida St.
132 Rider
133 St. John's
134 Pennsylvania
135 Virginia Tech
136 Cornell
137 Princeton
138 Air Force
139 Davidson
140 Chattanooga
141 Mississippi
142 Tennessee
143 Georgia
144 NC Greensboro
145 Gardner Webb
146 Missouri Kansas City
147 Wofford
148 Auburn
149 Georgia Southern
150 IUPUI
151 San Diego St.
152 Appalachian St.
153 Cal St. Fullerton
154 Colorado St.
155 Middle Tennessee
156 Brigham Young
157 Cal Santa Barbara
158 College of Charleston
159 Holy Cross
160 Boston University
161 Charleston Southern
162 Furman
163