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[QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1954928, member: 289"]
It occurred to me that with a new basketball season beginning I could do an “Against Ranked Teams”  post for this sport, too. The margins of victory are similar to football. The formula is to first give each team that plays a ranked team from 1-25 points based on the ranking (I’ll use the writer’s poll) of their opponent. This chart shows you how many points they’d get for playing each team ranked at a certain level , (the ranking is first, the points, second):

1-25, 2-24, 3-23, 4-22, 5-21, 6-20, 7-19, 8-18, 9-17, 10-16, 11-15, 12-14, 13-13, 14-12, 15-11, 16-10, 17-9, 18-8, 19-7, 20-6, 21-5, 22-4, 23-3, 24-2, 25-1

I’ll call those “schedule points”.  Then you look at the point differential in the game and apply it to the schedule points. If a team loses to the #1 ranked team by 10 points. They’d wind up with 15 points: 25 schedule points minus the ten points they lost by. If a team beats the #10 team by 5 points, they’d get 21 points: 16 schedule points plus the 5 points they won by. If a team lost to the #20 team by 6 points, they’d get nothing. The margin of defeat would cancel out their schedule points. If a team lost to the #25 team by 3 points, they get a zero. You can’t have negative points. You just failed in an attempt to get positive points.

I’ll figure the points based on games over the past week every Sunday and post them, along with cumulative season standings, just as I have done for football. As I said on that post, this is less a way of ranking than it is simply something you might want to look at in ranking them – or selecting them for a tournament.  I recognize that rankings will change over the course of the season. I’m making the assumption that teams are worthy of the ranking they have at the time another team plays them. That may not always be true but a subsequent ranking may just reflect how good or bad a team has become since the game in question: they may have been as good as their ranking at the time.

WEEK ONE (November 11-12/ 2016: the season began on a Friday.)

Indiana beat #3 Kansas 103-99 =                                27 points (23 schedule points plus a 4 point victory margin)
Wagner beat #18 Connecticut 67-58 =                    17 points
Arizona beat #12 Michigan State 65-63 =               16 points
Lehigh lost to #7 Xavier 81-84 =                                  16 points
Michigan State lost to #10 Arizona 63-65 =            14 points
Kansas lost to #11 Indiana 99-103 =                          11 points
Army lost to #5 Oregon 77-91 =                                  7 points
Stephen . Austin lost to #2 Kentucky 64-87 =        1 point

[B]Cumulative Totals[/B]

Indiana                                 27 points
Wagner                                                17 points
Arizona                                 16 points
Lehigh                                   16 points
Michigan State                  14 points
Kansas                                  11 points
Army                                      7 points
Stephen . Austin               1 point
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