Preseason Rankings Roundup

With the NCAA basketball season just weeks away, everyone's been releasing their preseason polls. The conference polls have been trickling in over the last week, and the national polls came out today.

The Ivy League released its preseason rankings yesterday, with Penn coming in at third behind Cornell and Princeton. Cornell is, as expected, the unanimous favorite, returning all five starters from last year's Ivy championship. You'd be hard-pressed to argue against the conference being Cornell's to lose.

Princeton, Penn, and Harvard are essentially in a dead heat for second place, with only 10 points separating the three schools. Yale, Columbia, Brown, and Dartmouth round out the bottom half of the League in that order.

Keep reading after the jump for a rundown of Penn's opponents in the national polls and to see how the other Big 5 schools are projected to finish in their own conferences.

The ESPN/USA Today Coaches Poll was released today, as was the AP Preseason Top 25. It turns out the Quakers will unsurprisingly have two top-10 opponents on their non-conference schedule.

Big 5 rival Villanova checks in at No. 6 in the Coaches' Poll and No. 5 in the media poll. The Wildcats lose last year's leading scorer in Dante Cunningham, but return nearly every other contributor from last year's Final Four squad (although senior guard Reggie Redding will be ineligible to play until Dec. 19. He was suspended by the school for the semester after being arrested this summer for possession of a "small amount" of marijuana.) They were also projected to win the Big East. The Quakers travel to Villanova, Pa. on Nov. 16.

Duke -- who will be playing in a New Year's Eve showdown in Durham, N.C. -- ranked in at No. 8 in the Coaches' poll and No. 9 in the media poll. This shouldn't shock anyone because, well, they're Duke. The Blue Devils always seem to be in the top 15 to start the season, and this year's squad should continue the program's success.

And Cornell received points in the Coaches' Poll, getting three points total. Not sure if someone thinks they're the 23rd best team, if three voters think they're the 25th best team, or something in between.

As for the other three Big 5 schools, the Atlantic 10 released their preseason polls last week. La Salle is picked to finish fourth, Temple fifth, and Saint Joseph's ninth. Though I wouldn't count out Fran Dunphy's Owls (even with Dionte Christmas having graduated), as they've won the past two A-10 championships.

And on a very tangentially related note, the makers of the Ivy League media guide appear to have made a fairly egregious error, incorrectly referring to Penn coach Glen Miller as "Steve Miller" in their outline for media teleconferences (they got it right in the actual teleconference). Don't mean to be overly nitpicky (and I know we make typos in the DP), but I feel like this is something fairly important that the League should proofread to get right. Guess they prefer Jet Airliner to In the Mood. (Check it out for yourself on page 3 of the Introduction to the League's Media Guide.)