BYU basketball is just outside the AP Top 25, but do rankings matter in age of data?

PROVO — After watching four teams directly in front of it lose at least one game last week, BYU basketball came oh-so-close to returning to the Associated Press Top 25 on Monday.

The Cougars (17-4, 5-1 WCC) inched up one spot in the national media poll, unofficially 26th with 120 points — or just 12 points behind No. 25 Davidson. With those 12 points, it would have marked the first time BYU had been ranked since Dec. 6, when it rose as high as No. 12 prior to losses to Utah Valley and Creighton away from home.

Since then, save for a couple of missteps at Gonzaga and to Vanderbilt in Hawaii, the Cougars have done almost everything they could to rejoin the rankings, capped by a three-game winning streak following Saturday's win against Portland. Of course, perfection doesn't always matter in the West Coast Conference, but BYU also had the fortune of a couple of losses directly in front of them in the polls, too.

The Cougars were unofficially 27th a week ago, or two spots outside the top 25 with 50 points, before losses by then-No. 20 Xavier, No. 22 Loyola-Chicago and No. 23 Texas, conspiring to potentially bump up BYU's vote total.

But Marquette's win over then-No. 20 Xavier and then-No. 11 Villanova, combined with Davidson's victories over VCU and Fordham, combined to lift the two from the ranks of the unranked and leave the Cougars on the outside looking in.

In similar fashion, Gonzaga dropped one spot from No. 2 after being eclipsed by Auburn, though the Tigers did boast a 9-point home win over then-No. 12 Kentucky on Saturday to garner 45 first-place votes. All the Zags had was a 78-62 win over San Francisco, which is receiving votes, to lay claim to a reduced 15 first-place votes.

In the AP women's poll, BYU inched up one spot to No. 16 after Saturday's win over San Diego, tying the program record for highest ranking with a mark set earlier this year before the Cougars' lone loss of the season to Oklahoma. BYU and Toreros will host a rematch in Provo at 5 p.m. MST Monday night.

Previously an eye-test of the top talented teams in the country, the AP poll has been reduced — in some fashion — to a vanity contest in an age where data and computer-based rankings are available across the college basketball internet. So how much do the AP rankings matter in today's college basketball landscape, though?

This isn't 1981, when the AP poll helped validate a team that rose through three top-20 teams in the Western Athletic Conference en route to the only Elite Eight appearance in program history — a team the Cougars honored Saturday night.

But for Mark Pope, the AP poll still holds value.

"I do care about the top 25, personally," the third-year BYU coach said last week. "I don't know if it makes a lot of difference. But I care about it personally because it's the perception — the media and public-driven perception — of the program. It might not be factual and it might be super biased, but I want people to be biased for BYU.

"I think it is a component of your program. I want people to think about BYU as a real program. At some places, the AP Top 25 is so different from the metric, and that's the difference between the (computer) numbers and the feeling. If I had to choose one, I would choose the facts every single time. But it's also important to me that people think about this program the way it is."

Obviously, the only important number comes in March, when 68 teams are seeded into the NCAA Tournament bracket and begin the win-or-go-home process that stalls the world for one glorious month of competition. For that, there are Team Sheets and NET scores and all kinds of data the selection committee uses to build the bracket.

Aside from that, a number of metrics are used to calculate team's abilities and comparisons against each other. From individual statistics to the NCAA's official NET ratings, every statistician with an algorithm seems to have a formula anymore: KenPom being the most common predictive metric, to lesser known ones like KPI, Massey and Torvik.

In each of those ratings, the Cougars fare quite well. They're ranked No. 25 in the NET, with a 3-2 record in Quad 1 games and 5-2 in Quad 2, both important for tournament purposes. Bart Torvik has BYU at No. 33 in the rating that stands out by ranking Houston as the No. 1 team in the country.

BYU also ranks 25th in KenPom — a metric that changes daily, but with a consistent top-40 rating in adjusted offense and top-30 in adjusted defense — and just behind No. 22 Saint Mary's, a slight difference from the NET, which favors the Cougars.

But aside from the college basketball diehards — the ones who have KenPom.com bookmarked on their web browser and check the NET regularly on NCAA.com — do those rankings mean much? Pope and his assistants are self-proclaimed analytics nerds, so they pay attention to those numbers.

But they also know that the general public is watching things like the AP poll. It gets people talking about your program, and when the outside world is talking about your program, it's nearly impossible to keep at least some of the noise from reaching the locker room.

So they talk about it with their players, too — briefly.

"We talk about it a little. But I don't think it's the main thing we talk about in the locker room," BYU guard Te'Jon Lucas said. "We're trying to stay in the moment and focus on the next game. We don't care at the end of the day if we're ranked or not; but at the end of the day, it is good for us. We just want to keep winning games as our main goal and purpose."

Even with all the other metrics, the branding power is still behind the AP poll. That makes Monday's dismissive a talking point for a BYU team still looking for respect while playing outside the Power Six conferences. In the end, all the Cougars can do is keep winning — and that starts Thursday at Santa Clara and Saturday at Pacific.

No ranking matters if those games aren't won. Even if BYU had found a way back in this week, a loss would've sent the Cougars freefalling — again — and back to the bottom of the hill to restart the climb.

So does the AP poll matter? In traditional coach speak, maybe not so much. it's a talking point, and one used to drive the media as much as the game. But for a moment — a few minutes before practice or in a short conversation with a local reporter — is it important?

Yeah, just a little.

"This is a special place, and what our guys are doing here is really special," Pope said. "So I do care about the public perception of this team a lot. And the thing is, what usually happens, is if you keep great at the facts, then over long periods of time you actually change the perception — and they start to match up a little bit better. That's what we're trying to do. We just have to do it consistently."

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