The Bilas Index -- The 68 best teams in men's college basketball - ESPN

Welcome to The Bilas Index, Volume I for the 2024-25 college basketball season. It has been an offseason of pleasant distractions, such as the Dodgers winning another World Series title, various and sundry Taylor Swift concerts, and the weekend airings of that ground acquisition game known as «football,» despite the painfully low occurrences of actually using the foot to impact the ball, and the sport in which the hours of game time are populated by such small time periods when the ball is actually in play.

Those banal distractions were helpful while we patiently waited for the arrival of the most beautiful game ever played to return to the floor. That moment is finally upon us, and what a welcome joy it is to see a game of balletic movement by world-class athletes with no stoppages after every play. A game in which players are required to compete on both offense and defense without committee meetings between plays. Basketball is, without reasonable debate, the most team-oriented, breathtakingly beautiful, strategically complicated game in world history, one that captures the imagination of those with fully evolved brains.

It can be daunting to determine the best of the 300+ teams in Division I that will contend for the national championship of this aesthetically pleasing game, both for inclusion into the postseason competition for the trophy and for the teams that can and the one that will take that trophy home. That is where The Bilastrator comes in. Through the hyperintelligent use of analytics combined with the unimaginable power of The Bilastrator's brain and basketball IQ.

Researchers have been studying for decades the unusual volume of gray matter inside The Bilastrator's bald dome, including the subtle