Premo-Porretta Power Poll
retroactive rankings in US college basketball
The Premo-Porretta Power Poll is a retroactive end-of-year ranking for American college basketball teams competing in the 1895–96 through the 1947–48 seasons. These rankings are not officially recognized by the NCAA.
The poll was intended to serve collectively as a source of information regarding the relative standings of college basketball teams within given seasons during the early decades of the sport. No systematic end-of-season national tournament existed in college basketball until the founding of the National Invitation Tournament in 1938 and the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship Tournament in 1939, the latter of which determines the NCAA champion for a given season. Furthermore, no regular, recognized national polling took place for college basketball prior to the establishment of the Associated Press poll and the coaches poll in the 1948–49 and 1950–51 seasons, respectively.
Background
Patrick Premo, a professor emeritus of accounting at St. Bonaventure University, and Phil Porretta, a former computer programmer, have each spent more than 40 years—first separately, and later collaboratively—researching the early history of college basketball. Their archival work has often uncovered game results that had not previously been reported in books and basketball program media guides, such as the results of competition against AAU, semi-professional, club, and YMCA teams. Whereas Bill Schroeder of the Helms Athletic Foundation retroactively named only his choice of the top team nationally for each season from 1900–01 through 1941–42 (and then annually selected a national champion for each season from 1942–43 through 1981–82), Premo and Porretta have used the data they have compiled to compare teams against one another and assign rankings to multiple teams for each season—15 teams for the 1895–96 season, 20 teams for each season from 1896–97 through 1908–09, and 25 teams for each season from 1909–10 through 1947–48.
Premo's findings, which he clarified were "simply his opinion", were first published in 1995 as the Premo Power Poll. Most recently, in 2009, Premo and Porretta's full collaborative rankings were included with the core information for each season prior to 1949 in the ESPN College Basketball Encyclopedia.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19869507. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1895, 1947, 1938 and 1939.
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This entry incorporates text from “Premo-Porretta Power Poll” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.