3/31 ITA Rankings Preview

Oklahoma is still on top as expected and has widened its margin to a 8.5 points over #2 Baylor thanks to a pair of top 10 wins last weekend over Texas and TCU.  This week's rankings use each team's top 7 best wins and then next week it'll go up to 8 and then the week after that it'll be at 9 and stay there until the end of the regular season. 

Viriginia makes the biggest jump inside the top 20 from 8 to 4 thanks to wins over North Carolina and Duke. Mississippi State should have the largest jump inside the top 40 as I see them coming up 8 spots from 34 to 26. Tulsa should also make a nice push jumping 7 spots from 27 to 20 after winning on the road at South Florida on Sunday.

Oklahoma State will take the biggest fall in the top 40 by dropping 8 spots from 22 to 30 after dropping a pair last week to Texas and TCU.  

Others Coming Up:

• Texas A&M is up 1 from 9 to 8 after beat Ole Miss.
• Virginia Tech is up 3 spots from 16 to 13 after knocking off North Carolina in a 4-3 thriller.  
• Florida comes up 4 spots from 20 to 16 after picking a road win at Auburn.  
• San Diego comes up 4 spots from 21 to 17 after beating San Francisco and seeing some of its best wins come up from the previous week.
• North Carolina State comes up 4 spots from 38 to 34 after knocking off Wake Forest
• Stanford comes up 5 spots from 43 to 38 after picking up wins over Utah and Arizona over the weekend.  

Others Going Down:

• North Carolina drops 5 spots from 14 to 19 after losing to Virginia and Virginia Tech plus it only had 6 ranked wins so the 7th best win will be a decent drop off in points.
• Northwestern drops 5 spots from 19 to 24 after losing to Rice and Ohio State.

Other Notes:

• Rice will re-enter the rankings around 47 after upsetting Northwestern and also picking up wins over Texas A&M Corpus Christi and Louisiana Lafayette.  

As the number of best wins increases, since many teams don't have that many ranked wins a little more guesswork comes into play so it's possible that a team maybe off 1 slot or so.


3/31 ITA Rankings Projections (ones in bold moves at least 5 spots)

Rank	School	Points	Previous
1	Oklahoma	86.36	1
2	Baylor	77.82	2
3	Illinois	77.65	3
4	Virginia	68.19	8
5	Duke	66.90	4
6	Georgia	66.38	5
7	USC	65.65	6
8	Texas A&M	64.16	9
9	Texas	60.07	7
10	TCU	53.63	10
11	Ohio State	49.82	11
12	Wake Forest	46.07	12
13	Virginia Tech	44.79	16
14	Ole Miss	44.29	13
15	UCLA	40.48	15
16	Florida	37.65	20
17	San Diego	36.55	21
18	Vanderbilt	36.52	17
19	North Carolina*	35.68	14
20	Tulsa*	35.15	27
21	South Florida	34.76	18
22	Louisville	32.85	23
23	Texas Tech	32.51	25
24	Northwestern	32.32	19
25	LSU*	30.67	24
26	Mississippi State	29.61	34
27	Princeton	29.37	28
28	Minnesota*	28.84	31
29	Columbia*	28.81	26
30	Oklahoma State	28.09	22
31	Drake	27.15	29
32	Florida State	26.62	32
33	California	26.53	30
34	NC State*	23.62	38
35	Notre Dame*	23.42	37
36	Harvard*	22.08	33
37	San Diego State*	20.37	35
38	Stanford*	18.14	43
39	SMU*	17.58	36
40	Denver*	16.34	41

* 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.