Congratulations, Tennessee, Auburn, Iowa State and Duke! Start plotting the parade route, Kentucky, Marquette, Alabama and Gonzaga! Make room for a banner in the rafters, in Florida, Kansas, Purdue and Oregon!
The story suggests that one of you will be climbing ladders and cutting nets in San Antonio on the first Monday evening in April.
These are the twelve best teams of this season Newly released Week 6 AP Polla poll that has proven to be a surprisingly accurate tool for predicting the eventual national champion in men’s college basketball. The last 20 national champions and 34 of the last 35 were each ranked in the top 12 of the AP poll from Week 6 of their respective season.
Since the 2003-04 season, the average Week 6 rating for the eventual national title winner is 4.8. As former ESPN college basketball writer John Gasaway was first to noteno other week of the season has been a better barometer, not even the polls released in late February or March.
The average preseason ranking of the last 20 eventual national champions is 9.5. These future national champions have an average ranking of 5.6 in the final AP poll before the start of the NCAA tournament.
The last time a team outside the top 12 in Week 6 made the national championship, freshman Carmelo Anthony was leading Jim Boeheim to his only Syracuse title. The late-blooming 2002-03 Orange didn’t enter the AP Top 25 until mid-January, but caught fire thanks to the exploits of Anthony, Hakim Warrick and Gerry McNamara.
Before that, you have to go all the way back to Danny Manning’s 1987-88 Kansas team to find another national champion that didn’t reach the AP top 12 in Week 6. Those 11-loss Jayhawks earned the nickname “Danny and the Miracles”. when they went from sixth place in the NCAA tournament to winning the national title.
Why is Week 6 the predictive sweet spot? Why did this particular poll outperform all others when it came to identifying the team that will soon be ankle-deep in confetti?
It’s easy to explain why AP voters are generally more reliable in week six than in previous iterations of the poll. By early December, the major multi-team tournaments are behind us, as are many marquee non-conference matchups. We know more about who is a contender and who is a contender than we did before the season started.
For example, take Auburn, which started this season outside the top 10 but has outperformed expectations. The Tigers made a strong case for first place with impressive wins over Houston, Iowa State, North Carolina and Memphis and a close loss to Duke.
Conversely, there are Arizona and North Carolina, preseason top 10 teams that thus far have failed to live up to the hype. Neither appear to be serious title contenders after suffering a total of eight early defeats and failing to secure a single marquee victory.
The bigger mystery is why Week 6 preconceptions proved as reliable, or more so, than AP voters’ end-of-season assessments. In theory, more games should provide more data points and a richer understanding of which teams are truly elite.
Sometimes that’s exactly what happens. In 2016, Villanova fell to No. 17 in the AP poll after two double-digit losses in December to Oklahoma and Virginia. Only in conference play did the Wildcats find their footing and rise to first en route to the first of Jay Wright’s two national titles.
However, most often, the rankings of national caliber teams do not fluctuate much. Of the 39 national champions since the NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985, 22 of them have never spent a single week outside the top 10.
UConn and Purdue, the two teams that played for the national title last season, have never dropped out of the AP top five after Week 6. Recent national champions Baylor in 2021, Virginia in 2019 or Villanova in 2018 neither. and did little to damage their stock afterwards.
The most striking outliers are a trio of UConn starting teams whose paths defied conventional wisdom while mirroring each other. In 2011, 2014 and 2023, the Huskies fell off the radar in November and December, struggled to achieve consistency in Big East play, then regained their early-season swagger once the playoffs began.
They were each in the top 10 in week 6. They each fell out of the top 20 in January or February. They each ended the season in a blizzard of red and blue confetti.
It would be good news for the SEC if the Week 6 AP Poll retained its predictive powers this year. The SEC has five of the top 12 teams this week, more than any other conference in the country.
Which team is most likely to take inspiration from Syracuse 2003 and go from outside the Top 12 in Week 6 to hoisting a championship trophy at season’s end? It could be two-time defending national champion UConn, which fell from No. 3 to No. 25 last week after three nightmarish days in Maui. The 18th-ranked Huskies have since stabilized, beating Baylor and Texas.
Besides UConn, Houston is another preseason top-five team that is out of the starting blocks but could yet re-emerge as a title threat. The 15th-ranked Cougars have squandered late leads against Auburn, Alabama and San Diego State so far this season.
BetMGM still lists UConn and Houston among the half-dozen favorites to win a national title this spring.
If either bet comes true, it would mean defying more than 20 years of polling history.
