Had a chance to speak with Ken Pomeroy, the statistics guru whose ranking have the Utes at No. 1 in the nation, and he was tremendously good-natured about his work.

Pomeroy acknowledged that it's far too early for his rankings -- based on mathematical formulas -- to feature the kind of predictive power that allowed the Wall Street Journal to correctly forecast the entire Final Four last season.

But after a few more weeks, once more teams have played more games, Pomeroy expects the rankings to reflect reality a lot more accurately.

"When you only have three games worth of data, and those three games have only three games worth of data, you can end up getting some misleading information," he said.

Still, Pomeroy believes the Utes "should be pretty good" this season, and not just because he's an associate instructor at the university who's hoping to provide coach Jim Boylen some statistical analysis. Pomeroy moved to Salt Lake City only a couple of years ago for his jobs -- he's also a meteorologist at the National Weather Service -- after growing up back East and living for awhile in Montana and Wyoming, so he said he doesn't have any home-grown attachment to the Utes.

But has does appreciate the way Boylen has improved the once-miserable defense, and believes it will make a difference.

"I do think they are kind of a sleeper team in the Mountain West," Pomeroy said. "It wouldn't surprise me at all if Utah snuck in there and won 10 or 11 games in the conference."