That’s what the numbers say. I don’t résumé rank. I do include that as a component, but right now, Florida has earned their place — just barely.

By way of an explanation, Florida’s RPI is higher, they are getting some votes in the beauty contests, and BBState’s system has them higher. Kenpom has us higher, but the other factors combined slightly outweigh that.

For what it’s worth, it is very close — Florida’s lead is in the second decimal place, 4.1644 to 4.1519. Arkansas is down at 3.9087 and all this is as of Thursday. You can consider Florida and UK tied if you prefer. :-)

And also for what it’s worth, I don’t really believe Florida is a better team than UK, they have significantly more serious deficiencies than we do. But when you have been NCAA Tournament Champion for two out of the last three years, there is some residual good will out there. UK has been the beneficiary of that before, just not lately.

But as I say, I don’t go by gut feel or what I see on TV. I let the AP and Coach’s poll component take care of that, to the extent it is addressed at all. I go mostly by the numbers of Kenpom and BBState, with a tiny bit of the RPI thrown in there for good measure.

The upside to this system is consistency and avoiding the wild swings, like we saw last week when the résumé rankers threw big numbers at Boston College because they beat UNC, just like they did when Arkansas beat two top ten teams in a row. We see today that neither of those two jumps were justified, at least not to that magnitude.

The downside to this system is that it tends to miss hot teams. It usually takes a couple of weeks of good performance before a hot team will find it’s way in. That’s somewhat mitigated by the weighting of the beauty contests, but not totally.

I’m afraid we’ll have to disagree about that. Statistically, UF and UK are very close. Win-wise, Florida has defeated Washington (currently ranked 25th by Kenpom), North Carolina State, and Mississippi. They have lost in close games to Syracuse and Florida State, both away from home.

Kentucky has lost two more games than Florida, losing at home to Miami and away to Louisville and UNC. Only the Louisville loss was close, and Louisville is closer to a neutral site than a true home game because of its proximity to UK. We won (as of the casting of this ballot) against only two major conference foes (not counting Indiana, which at #241, does not qualify in my book this year). Both were better wins than Florida’s two best, no doubt, but we have also had worse losses.

The two are very comparable schedule-wise. I don’t see how you can make a convincing case that either is clearly superior to the other based on the facts.