Pac-12 Men's Basketball Power Rankings: Week 11

Time for our pre–Pac-12 Tournament Power Rankings! It'll be interesting to see how these rankings compare to the teams' performances in Las Vegas.

Tied teams are listed alphabetically and the number of first-place votes earned by each team is listed parenthetically.

Before we get to the rankings, let's quickly check in with boomtho about his thought process as he crafted his ballot:

boomtho: This week's power rankings take on an 'end of season' vibe vs the weekly rankings I've been doing. As such, they'll more closely mirror the final standings, though there is still some deviation.

The rankings

1. Arizona Wildcats (4) 

Last week: 1

Nick Kranz: Four of the best seven players in the conference started for this team. Maybe four of the best five, depending on how you felt about Joseph Young and Chasson Randle.

Ruey Yen: Undisputed conference champs.

boomtho: best team in the league, most talented, most consistent

2. Utah Utes

Last week: 2

Nick Kranz: I'm keeping Utah in the 2 spot, in part because I found their 13-5 conference performance more impressive than Oregon's 13-5 performance, and in part because if Oregon had to play a game in SLC this year, they wouldn't be the 2 seed in the Pac-12 tournament #endunbalancedschedules

Ruey Yen: Oregon may be the 2nd seed in the Pac-12 tourney, Utah will go further in March.

boomtho: really a deserving challenger to Arizona. I'd be shocked if their coach (still can't spell his name!) isn't a hot candidate for bigger jobs this offseason.

3. Oregon Ducks

Last week: 3

Nick Kranz: Kenpom's theory on how Dana Altman kept Oregon competitive intrigues me. It also makes me miss Allen Crabbe.

Ruey Yen: 3rd and final team from the Pac to make the tourney this year, barring a darkhorse winner (Cal? probably not)

boomtho: Altman rode Joseph Young to a ridiculously impressive #3 seed.

4. UC L.A. Bruins

Last week: 4

Nick Kranz: Likely needs a win over Arizona to make the tournament, and do you really see that happening?

Ruey Yen: Doomed this year by playing subpar on the road

boomtho: #4 by default. Thought about putting them at 5th given how disappointing they were this year relative to talent and expectations

5. Arizona State Sun Devils

Last week: 7

Nick Kranz: I'd kinda like ASU's dark horse Pac-12 tournament chances if they weren't on the same side of the bracket as Arizona. But I guess you have to go through the Wildcats eventually anyway, and we know ASU can beat 'em.

Ruey Yen: One of two teams to be able to claim a victory of Zona. Wins over Bay Area schools to close conference play.

boomtho: Tied with Furd for 5th, but significantly outperformed expectations (and honestly their talent level). Sendek manages to get himself off the hot seat again I think

6. Stanfurd Cardinal

Last week: 5

Nick Kranz: I think Stanford's best returning player next year is Roscoe Allen?

Ruey Yen: Slotted behind ASU since they lost to them last week

boomtho: Finish tied for 5th, but think given their talent they disappointed. I hope Dawkins stays over!

7. Oregon State Beavers

Last week: 8

Nick Kranz: What say you, CGB denizens? Are you team start-walk-ons, or team start-your-best-players?

Ruey Yen: The other team with a win over Zona

boomtho: Bumping them over Furd because they again outperformed expectations, and also it's boring to just match the standings

8. California Golden Bears

Last week: 6

Nick Kranz: CBI is a thing? Nah, I'm ready for an off-season of Ty-to-NBA rumors and 18 year old twitter analysis!

Ruey Yen: Up and down conference play this year

boomtho: We tied with Colorado and WSU, but they entered the year higher expectations. I was really down on Cuonzo in the middle of the year, and I'm glad to think I was very wrong. Hope Rabb and a potentially stellar recruiting class can bump us higher next year!

9. Colorado Buffaloes

Last week: 10

Nick Kranz: Can't help but wonder if this team will be better off without Askia Booker taking 36% of their shots.

Ruey Yen: Same conference record as Cal and Wazzu

boomtho: Disappointing. I honestly thought Boyle was a much better coach than this... let's see how they bounce back next year.

10. Washington State Cougars

Last week: 9

Nick Kranz: I like the cosmic balance of both Mike Leach and Ernie Kent forever playing wildly entertaining, ultimately losing strategies in Pullman.

Ruey Yen: Same conference record as Cal and Colorado

boomtho: Peskier than I thought they'd be given the talent deficit around Lacy

11. Washington Huskies

Last week: 12

Nick Kranz: It's so Romar to go 2-10 to end conference play, and have one of those wins be over nationall ranked Utah.

Ruey Yen: I missed the game, how did they beat Utah?

boomtho: Romar!

12. USC Trojans

Last week: 11

Nick Kranz: True, USC is one of the youngest teams you'll ever see. But I can't help but think that you would still want to see more competitiveness from them to have much hope for the future.

Ruey Yen: It's okay, they don't care about basketball at USC anyhow.

boomtho: Dunk City has not materialized

The data

Let's take a glorious gander at our gallery of gallant go-getters? Go-getters is lame. But they're voters/writers/adonises brought to life and cast in steel and lava. But there's no word that starts with the letter "G" and has that meaning.

Rk	boomtho	Nick	ragnarok	Ruey
1	Arizona	Arizona	Arizona	Arizona
2	Utah	Utah	Utah	Utah
3	Oregon	Oregon	Oregon	Oregon
4	UC L.A.	UC L.A.	UC L.A.	UC L.A.
5	ASU	ASU	ASU	ASU
6	OSU	Stanfurd	Stanfurd	Stanfurd
7	Stanfurd	California	OSU	OSU
8	California	OSU	Cal	California
9	WSU	Colorado	WSU	Colorado
10	Colorado	WSU	Washington	WSU
11	Washington	Washington	Colorado	Washington
12	USC	USC	USC	USC

Table 1. Da votes!

The numbers get averaged out to determine the rankings of the Power Rankings of the week! We can take a look at these precisely averaged rankings in Figure 1, with an additional measure of how varied the responses were for each team with the vertical error bar representing one standard deviation.

Figure 1. Where each team ended up—precisely—with vertical error bars showing how torn we were on each team.

We track these precise rankings over the course of the season to show you how consistent or inconsistent each team was.

Figure 2. The season in terms of precise rankings.

Well, it looks like we're pretty confident in most of the teams this week. Our writers were all in unanimous agreement for the top-five teams. For the next three teams, OSU was also unanimously 7th and was flanked by Cal and Stanfurd, which were each close to earning 100% consensus. Then, there's a pretty big gap until WSU and Colorado, who are nearly tied.

For the sake of simplicity and conformity, we can round these rankings to integer values, which is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3.  The rounded rankings for this season!

This view shows us that the status was mostly quo'd this week; very little movement this week. We do have a nice little back-in-forth for the Pac-12 basement between UW and USC. Oh, those tricky schools that start with a "U." Lucky for Utah and UC Los Angeles to stay out of this slapfight.

But the measure of the consistency of the status quo has been quantified with the measure of Madness—a value that tells us how much each team has moved up or down in our Power Rankings.

	Change on week
	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	Team's Madness
Arizona	0	-1	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0				2
ASU	-1	-2	1	1	0	3	1	0	-2	2				13
Cal	0	-4	-2	0	2	2	1	-1	2	-2				16
Colorado	4	-1	-2	1	0	-2	0	0	-1	0				11
Oregon	1	0	-4	3	0	2	-1	1	0	0				12
OSU	1	6	0	0	-2	3	-5	2	-2	1				22
Stanfurd	0	0	0	0	0	-2	0	1	-1	-1				5
UC L.A.	-4	5	1	-2	3	-3	4	-3	2	0				27
USC	-2	3	-2	0	-1	0	1	-1	1	-1				12
Utah	0	1	-1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0				2
Washington	-3	-5	6	0	-5	0	-1	1	-1	1				23
WSU	4	0	1	-3	2	-2	0	0	1	0				13
Total Madness	20	28	21	10	15	19	14	10	13	8

Table 2. The MADNESS of the Pac-12! How much do the teams move up or down?

What a woefully boring week! The most stable for Men's Basketball this season! Our Maddest teams of UC Los Angeles and Oregon State could barely muster up any Mad.