| USA TODAY
The USA TODAY Sports college basketball research preseason has been launched, and South Carolina will open the year exactly where the last season ended – first.
Although South Carolina already has a national championship under coach Dawn Staley, this is the first pre-season ranking in the program’s history, obtaining all but one of the 32 first-place votes from the coach panel. Gamecocks, who won SEC regular season and tournament titles a season ago, were also voted number 1 in the final ranking when the NCAA tournament was canceled in March because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pre-season vote for the second was much closer. Stanford will start in second place, taking the rest of the vote for first place and finishing eight points ahead of third place in Connecticut. With Baylor and Louisville in the next two places, five different conferences are represented in the top five.
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Power leagues dominate polls, with SEC, Pac-12 and Big Ten entering the season with five teams ranked each. Pac-12 has four in the top ten, while number 11, Maryland, leads the top ten. ACC features four qualified teams, with two from each of the Big 12 and Big East.