Don't get me wrong. I love Dick Vitale. I love anyone who is consistently enthusiastic about college basketball. It's the best sport there is, and Vitale will talk about it to anyone, at anytime, and do it with passion and enthusiasm.
That said, what he has to actually say about the game is questionable at times. At least I feel that way. And so to test that theory I've devised a competition.
We're all college basketball experts, right? To show this, back in the fall, every site posted their preseason top-25 and discussed it as if it were meaningful. Then we all moved on to the next topics where we were experts.
Unfortunately (for some of those sites) and fortunately (if your name is Team Rankings) I bookmarked those top-25s for later use.
And today I debut the standings in what has become the Vitale Cup. The goal is to award the worst college basketball prognosticator of each season.
It's a simple system. I compare each site's preseason top-25 to the current AP top-25, and see what's what.
If you're interested in the scoring, it goes like this. 1 point is awarded for each team correctly placed in the top-25. If the team is within 5 spots of their actual placement, a bonus point is awarded. If it is within 1 spot, a second bonus point is awarded. And finally, if you were the closest of all the contest members for any particular team, another bonus point is awarded for a maximum of 4 points per team. If someone were to correctly guess the entire top-25 exactly as it were to finish, they would be awarded 100 points.
On the negative end, if a team in your preseason top-25 does not actually appear in the real top-25, then 2 points are deducted. If you were the most wrong of all the entrants, a bonus point is deducted.
The worst score wins this year's Cup. They'll even get their name on the banner which is currently in the legal department.
Here are the standings based on today's top-25. If you have a top-25 that you would like to see included, please email me the link, send it to me via Twitter, or leave it in the comments section below.
| Points | |
| Jon Rothstein | -4 |
| NBC Sports | -4 |
| Dick Vitale | 1 |
| Hoops Vision | 5 |
| Mike DeCourcy | 5 |
| Sheridan Hoops | 6 |
| ESPN | 7 |
| b/r | 8 |
| Sports Illustrated | 8 |
| SB Nation | 9 |
| Run the Floor | 9 |
| Yahoo! | 9 |
| Rush the Court | 11 |
| Blue Ribbon | 12 |
| Team Rankings | 20 |
