3/17 ITA Rankings Preview

Definitely going to be some big movement in the rankings this week with several teams picking up keys wins while some took some rough losses.  This week's rankings are the last set to use each team's top 5 best wins and then starting next week with the March 24th rankings they'll use each team's 6 best wins and then every subsequent week after that they add 1 more best win to get up to 9 by April 14th.

Wake Forest will have the biggest jump within the top 20 as the Demon Deacons will move up from 19 to 12 on the strength of a pair of wins over Florida State and Louisville.  Tulsa also makes a big move from 29 to 20 after knocking off Ohio State yesterday.

Indiana will take the biggest fall in the top 40 by dropping from 30 to 39 after losing to Texas Tech and having some of its best wins drop in the rankings from the week before.  

Others Coming Up:

• Illinois moves up from 4 to 2 after beating both Texas and Texas A&M on the road.
• LSU moves up 10 spots from 33 to 23 after beating Vanderbilt 
• Texas Tech moves up 10 spots from 34 to 24 after beating San Diego and winning at Indiana. 
• SMU moves up 13 spots from 47 to 34 after winning on the road at Pepperdine and Cal Poly.
• Mississippi State moves up 7 spots from 42 to 35 after winning on the road at Auburn plus they picked up a good chunk of points with Alabama moving into the rankings last week since State has 2 wins over the Tide.
• Tennessee moves up 15 spots from 55 to 40 after beating South Carolina plus the Vols benefited from Georgia Tech coming into the rankings since the Vols have a road win at GT.  

Others Going Down:

• Vanderbilt drops 6 spots from 11 to 17 after losing at Texas A&M and LSU. 
• UCLA drops 5 spots from 14 to 19 after losing to USC and having some of its best wins drop in the rankings from the previous week and having some of its losses drop as well.
• Columbia drops 7 spots from 23 to 30 after losing at Northwestern plus Columbia only had 3 top 75 wins right now and 1 of those (Notre Dame) dropped heavily last week. 
• Drake drops 8 spots from 25 to 33 largely due to its lost to unranked UNC-Wilmington though that will just be temporary because UNC-Wilmington will make a big jump this week.  

Notes: 

• UNC Wilmington should go from unranked to around the 48-53 range after beating Drake and Penn State last weekend at the USF Spring Break Tournament.  
• Alabama should come up another 10-11 spots after winning at Auburn.

3/17 ITA Rankings Projections (ones in bold moves at least 5 spots)

Rank	School	Points	Previous
1	Oklahoma	83.79	1
2	Illinois	82.89	4
3	Baylor	77.90	2
4	USC	72.95	5
5	Georgia	71.42	3
6	Duke	69.44	6
7	Texas A&M	63.82	9
8	Texas	59.11	8
9	Virginia	58.64	7
10	North Carolina	52.46	12
11	Ohio State	51.38	10
12	Wake Forest	48.32	19
13	Ole Miss	44.75	13
14	Northwestern	43.37	16
15	Florida	43.13	18
16	Virginia Tech	41.13	15
17	Vanderbilt	40.87	11
18	TCU	40.84	17
19	UCLA	40.48	14
20	Tulsa	35.50	29
21	South Florida	35.34	20
22	Harvard	34.60	21
23	LSU*	31.94	33
24	Texas Tech	31.38	34
25	Minnesota	30.95	22
26	Louisville	28.86	28
27	Florida State	28.09	24
28	California	27.14	26
29	San Diego*	25.91	31
30	Columbia*	25.72	23
31	Oklahoma State	25.45	32
32	Princeton	25.36	27
33	Drake	24.83	25
34	SMU	23.82	47
35	Mississippi State	22.97	42
36	Notre Dame*	22.84	36
37	NC State*	20.54	37
38	San Diego State*	20.00	35
39	Indiana*	19.80	30
40	Tennessee*	17.94	55

* represents a team that has a win over someone that is ranked between 75-125 however it's tough to be 100% accurate pinpointing where in that range the team falls so the point totals may be off a bit.