Jay Bilas provided his accounting of the current NCAA Tournament field on Wednesday, ranking the top 68 teams in college basketball.
The ESPN hoops analyst had 5 SEC teams inside his top 10, which came as no surprise. In recent weeks, Bilas has consistently claimed this year’s SEC to be one of the most powerful conferences in major college basketball history. He has 8 of the league’s teams in his top 25 and 14 in his top 50.
Here’s Bilas’s updated top 10:
Bilas disagrees with AP voters in several spots. For one, Florida got a first-place vote in the latest AP poll and sat at No. 2. Bilas has the Gators 2 spots lower while he has Houston 2 spots higher. He also has Purdue in his top 10 while AP voters slotted the Boilermakers 13th.
Purdue lost its third consecutive game on Tuesday night, so it might drop even more in next week’s poll.
On Auburn, Bilas wrote that Bruce Pearl’s group is “battle-tested” after a “hellacious” schedule and is the best team in college basketball. But there was a distinction, he drew, between “best” and “most talented.” Duke, he wrote, is the most talented team in the country.
On Florida, Bilas echoed comments he made last weekend on GameDay, highlighting the Gators’ defensive growth. Florida has the seventh-best adjusted defensive rating in the country, per KenPom. A year ago, the Gators ranked 94th in that same metric.
Bilas said on GameDay that Florida can “win it all” if it continues to defend at a high level.
When it comes to the betting markets, Bilas’s ranking of the top teams in basketball perfectly aligns. Auburn (+325) is the outright favorite to win the national championship at BetMGM. Duke is next, priced at +425, followed by Houston (+900), Florida (+900), Alabama (+1100), and Tennessee (+1600).
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Derek Peterson does a bit of everything, not unlike Taysom Hill. He has covered Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Pac-12, and now delivers CFB-wide content.
