Conference tournaments are finally here, which means the NCAA tournaments are right around the corner. Throughout the next week, Alex Gruskin will be diving into the field of college tennis teams to break down who has the best shot at the title. Stay tuned!

After a year of Spitgates, Parsa-bombs, overzealous court-rushes [1], monumental upsets, and way too many hooks to keep track of, we are officially less than one month away from the start of the 2018 Division I Men’s NCAA Tennis Championships. For the first time in almost a decade, it feels as though multiple teams have a legitimate chance at taking home the championship this spring. Gone are the days of Stevie Johnson’s Trojans or Brian Boland’s ‘Hoos. And while Wake Forest has sat atop the men’s national rankings for 14 consecutive weeks, only three current players in the entire country have been a part of an NCAA outdoor title team [2]. Given the relative lack of championship experience of the top teams, the added variance caused by college’s no-ad scoring format, and the many upsets we’ve seen throughout the 2018 season, all signs point to this year’s tournament being wide open for the taking.

With conference play finally wrapped up, now seems like the perfect time to rank the front-runners for this year’s national title. And that is exactly what I’ll be doing. Over the course of the next week, I will be making cases for the teams I believe are capable of taking home this year’s national title. Others may disagree, but I see six teams as legitimately capable of getting hot enough to take home the championship. That does not mean that I think that each of these teams is equally likely to win, but rather that these six teams each possess the right combination of top-end talent, lineup depth, doubles strength, and big match experience to get the job done this May.

The format of these rankings is fairly straightforward. To help differentiate each team’s title chances, I have divided the contenders into three categories: The Favorite, The Contenders, and The Rising Giants [3]. I will discuss what each team has accomplished during the 2018 season, what has to happen for each team to win the title, what could possibly go wrong, and the percent chances I have of each squad winning it all.

Personal bias will certainly play a role in these rankings, as will things such as dual match results, players’ Universal Tennis Ratings, coaches’ postseason experience, and a few other miscellaneous tidbits I’ve picked up along the way. As always, the opinions in this article are my own, and I am happy to debate them with anyone kind enough to read or comment on this piece.

In order fo their current ITA ranking, here are the 6 teams I believe have a real shot at winning it all:

Wake Forest

UCLA

Ohio State

Stanford

Texas A&M

UNC

Comeback later this afternoon, where I’ll be starting with this year’s tournament hosts and #1 ranked Wake Forest, who after four months of play, must be considered the favorite to bring home their first title in program history.

Who do you think will be the top contenders for this year’s title. Let us know i nthe comments below, and come back Friday, amnd every day next week to see who made Gruskin’s list.

[1] Tangent #1: Listen, I appreciate a good celebration as much as anyone else. I really do. However, do teams really need to be rushing the court and mobbing their teammates after every single win? A 4-1 conference victory on a random March Saturday does not constitute an occasion worthy of the court rush!!!! STOP RUINING MY FAVORITE CELEBRATIONS!!!! #SavetheCourtRush

[2] The three players: Virginia’s Ammar Alhaqbani, Aswin Lizen, and Carl Soderlund. Henrik Wiersholm too, but he’s out for the season with an injury.

[3] I also couldn’t resist adding a Dark Horse category to the end of the article, naming five additional teams I think have a non-zero percent chance of winning the title.

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