4/21 ITA Rankings Preview

The top 2 stays the same though Baylor narrowed the gap from 10 points to 7 points after picking up wins over Texas and Texas Tech last week. Texas A&M surged up from 6 to 3 by adding 3 top 25 wins after beating LSU, Mississippi State, and Georgia in route to the SEC Championship.  Illinois drops 1 spot from 3 to 4 after getting stunned by Minnesota - had the Illini not lost they would have been #3 with 70.44 points.  Virginia drops 1 spot from 4 to 5 though they'll have a chance to add some top 15 wins next week in the ACC Tournament.  

This week's rankings use each team's top 9 best wins and they will be the last set of published rankings before the NCAA Tournament field is announced on April 28th.  The rankings will be run next week by the ITA but they just won't be published until May 1st - I guess this is done so everyone won't know if they deviated from the rankings when doing the seeding.  I'll do my best to run them next week but it's the toughest of the year because they actually get run twice - once like normal using the 4/21 rankings as a base - then after finishing those they re-run them using the new rankings as a base.  I should be able to narrow down the Top 20 with pretty good accuracy because most of their wins are over top 30-40 teams.    

Minnesota was the big winner last week moving up 10 spots from 33 to 23 after picking up wins over then #3 Illinois and #27 Northwestern with both matches decided by a 3rd set tiebreak.   

Florida and San Diego both had the biggest falls each dropping 4 spots.  Florida lost in the SEC Quarterfinals to Mississippi State while San Diego had a light week with just one match against BYU.  San Diego's drop was tied to Mississippi State, South Florida, and Columbia each picking up nice wins.  San Diego will have a chance to add more quality wins this weekend in the WCC Tournament.   

Others Coming Up:

• TCU comes up 1 spots from 7 to 6 after its big win on Saturday over Texas.
• UCLA comes up 3 spots from 19 to 16 despite losing to USC.  The Bruins benefited from Texas Tech, Stanford, and TCU each rising in the rankings plus the losses to Georgia and North Carolina were lessened when those teams moved up into a higher bracket.
• Columbia comes up 3 spots from 23 to 20 after winning at Princeton and beating Penn at home. 
• Cal comes up 3 spots from 28 to 25 after picking up a road win at Stanford. 
• Memphis should come up 6 spots from 49 to 43 after beating SMU in the AAC Tournament plus it got a points boost when South Alabama re-entered the rankings.

Others Going Down:

• Stanford drops 3 spots from 24 to 27 after losing at home to Cal.  The wins over USC and UCLA were lessened a bit when they both fell a few spots in last week's rankings.  
• Northwestern drops 3 spots fro 27 to 30 after the Wildcats lost a 4-3 heartbreaker at Minnesota.  

Other Notes:

• SMU, Dartmouth, Penn State, Oregon, and Cornell, should be in the 46-50 range with less than 2 points separating them from #45. 
• Georgia Tech will re-enter the rankings after upsetting then #8 Duke 4-3.  I have them somewhere in the 53-57 range.  
• I tweeted out the top 10 yesterday but had 1 too many wins for Texas A&M so their points came down some from that tweet. 

4/21 ITA Rankings Projections (ones in bold moves at least 4 spots)

Rank	School	Points	Previous
1	Oklahoma	84.79	1
2	Baylor	77.91	2
3	Texas A&M	69.94	6
4	Illinois	65.61	3
5	Virginia	65.52	4
6	TCU	65.07	7
7	Georgia	63.85	5
8	USC	62.70	9
9	Duke	57.11	8
10	Texas	57.03	10
11	Wake Forest	48.21	12
12	Ohio State	47.07	11
13	Ole Miss	45.58	13
14	Virginia Tech	45.03	14
15	North Carolina	43.64	15
16	UCLA	42.38	19
17	Texas Tech	39.80	16
18	Mississippi State	39.23	20
19	South Florida	38.92	21
20	Columbia*	38.28	23
21	Florida	38.10	17
22	San Diego	38.02	18
23	Minnesota	36.45	33
24	Vanderbilt	34.83	22
25	California	32.67	28
26	LSU	30.45	25
27	Stanford*	30.39	24
28	Tulsa*	28.68	26
29	Oklahoma State	27.76	29
30	Northwestern*	27.35	27
31	Drake	27.04	31
32	Louisville*	26.08	30
33	Florida State*	25.61	32
34	Harvard*	24.79	34
35	Notre Dame*	23.37	37
36	Princeton*	23.30	35
37	NC State*	20.18	36
38	San Diego State*	18.63	38
39	New Mexico*	17.74	41
40	Tennessee*	17.43	42
41	Tulane*	16.61	39
42	Pepperdine*	16.11	40
43	Memphis*	16.07	49
44	Indiana*	15.58	43
45	South Carolina*	15.51	45

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