The Ivy League Media Poll was released today and, as in most years, it largely mirrors last season’s finish.
Two things stood out:
- The top of the poll is more one-sided than expected. Princeton drew 15 first-place votes to Columbia’s 5. The point totals also leave only one possible vote distribution for the top four teams.
- The bottom half is a toss-up. From Brown down to Dartmouth, many different vote distributions produce the same point totals, so the order says little about how voters actually separated those four teams.
Bart Torvick also released his preseason rankings. For what it may be worth, a quick AI based review:
https://barttorvik.com/ncaaw/trank.php?year=2027#
Bart Torvik’s preseason ratings suggest the race is tighter than the poll implies:
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Columbia and Princeton look almost interchangeable at the top, with Torvik giving Columbia a slight edge. Harvard is close enough to challenge both. That is a much narrower gap than voters’ 15–5 split suggests.
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Penn is the clear fourth team, well ahead of fifth-place Yale, which makes an Ivy tournament berth a reasonable expectation.
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Penn’s path upward is defense. Its offense ranks 87th nationally but its defense ranks 115th, while Columbia’s and Harvard’s defenses rank 61st and 50th.
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The league is sharply divided. Four top-100 teams give it a competitive upper tier, while three teams sit below No. 225.
More in the way of background: It’s a model that projects each team’s efficiency ratings from roster data, and the details below come from Torvik’s men’s ratings.
- Offense is built up from the roster. The formulas account for transfers, recruits and departing players, using each player’s prior production, or recruiting ranking for freshmen, to project a team’s offensive rating. Torvik calculates a player’s offensive rating as points produced divided by possessions used, and he plugs in transfer commitments as they happen. cyclonefanaticwdrb
- Defense leans on program history. Defensive projections rely more on the program’s defensive ratings from previous seasons, because individual defensive metrics carry over poorly from year to year, while a coach’s defensive success tends to persist. cyclonefanatic
Team profiles:
- Columbia: The most balanced team, with a top-65 offense (56th) and defense (61st). It also plays at the league’s fastest pace.
- Princeton: The league’s best offense (103.7, 44th nationally), paired with a merely solid defense (90th). It plays slowly (334th in tempo).
- Harvard: The league’s best defense (86.6, 50th), carrying an offense that ranks only 91st.
- Penn: A mirror image of Harvard. Its offense (87th) is ahead of its defense (115th), and it plays at a slow pace.
- Yale: Evenly mediocre on both ends (176th offense, 177th defense). It plays at the league’s second-fastest pace.
- Cornell: Ranks 233rd on both offense and defense, and is the slowest team in the league (355th in tempo).
- Brown: The league’s weakest offense (270th), offset by a defense (189th) that rates sixth in the Ivy.
- Dartmouth: Its offense (205th) is better than Cornell’s or Brown’s. A 335th-ranked defense is the main reason it sits last.