Happy Thanksgiving! Steal away when you can to enjoy a huge helping of the 2021-22 debut edition of the Hey Nineteen rankings
7 min read
Happy Thanksgiving, college hoopheads! If you’ve swung by on this delectable holiday, well, you really love college basketball. And for that, I am most certainly thankful. In return I am serving up a smorgasbord of teams in the form of that ever-reliable source of cheer and anger … power rankings! We normally save the debut of these power rankings for the week after Thanksgiving, but there’s been so much interesting action in the past few days, why not dive in?
Keep in mind that many of these teams are playing multiple games Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, so the shelf life on these rankings will be shorter than any other edition this season. However, this is a snapshot of where we’re at 17 days in.
And as a reminder on how this all works: I am not ranking teams based solely on who I think is best. (Gary Parrish’s Top 25 And 1 already does that on a daily basis.) My Hey Nineteen rankings are a weekly encapsulation of the 19 hottest, most successful and/or most interesting teams in college basketball, combining team quality with win quality but also leaving no shame for recency bias and rewarding significant winning streaks.
Why “Hey Nineteen”? Because 16 teams is what everyone else does for power rankings, and we march to the beat of a different drummer here. That drummer specifically being Rick Marotta. Cue The Dan, cut the pie and enjoy the hoops (OK: and football).
