If 21 years of history are any indication, men’s college basketball fans can narrow down this season’s national championship contenders to just 12 teams based on one key stat.
While gripes from fans and media members about the accuracy of the AP poll are a weekly occurrence, the poll has proven to have surprisingly strong predictive value of who cuts down the nets in a season. Amazingly, every national champion since 2004 has ranked in the top 12 of the AP poll entering the sixth week of the season. Former ESPN writer John Gasaway was the first to write about this, and since then, the wild stat has been propped up by fans and media members around the sport with remarkable success. The only AP poll week that has proven more predictive of March success is the final one that comes out the day after Selection Sunday.
