NCAAB

College Basketball: Historical Comparisons for This Season's Top-10 Teams

The nation's top squads resemble teams from past seasons, which may tell us how this year's elite will fare down the road

We are halfway through the college basketball regular season, which gives us a sufficient sample size to know the strengths and weaknesses of every team in the nation. For the top teams in the country, there are certainly more strengths than weaknesses, but that does not make them shoo-in for a deep run in the NCAA Tournament.

Sometimes we can use history to give us a better understanding of things in the future. In this case, we can look at the attributes and basic personality of teams and compare them to teams from past seasons to see how the rest of this year may play out.

We have identified the best comparison from the past 17 seasons for each of the nation's top-10 teams, according to nERD -- our metric that predicts a team's ultimate winning percentage-- using our offensive and defensive rating as the major factors.