First Top 25 Poll Is Out

The first Coaches Poll of the season is out. You can compare it with my most recent BP65 here. I'm not going to quibble too much with the top of the rankings. Everybody knew Kansas would be the preseason #1, and I agree with North Carolina, Kentucky and Villanova as the highest ranked teams in the ACC, SEC and Big East respectively. I continue to think that Michigan State is a bit overrated because Goran Suton was so much more important than just his stats, but I still do consider them a competitor to win the Big Ten.

Probably the most interesting thing with the poll is the truly bizarre 22 votes for USC. Gary Parrish of CBS makes a point that may be facetious, but might also be true: could those votes have been for South Carolina? "South Carolina" does get one vote as well, and I wouldn't put South Carolina in the Top 25 either (right now I see them as a bubble team that ends up in the NIT), but at least one can make an educated argument for South Carolina in the Top 25. As Parrish says, "there is no way anybody who knows anything about college basketball could put Southern California on a Top 25 ballot". I totally agree, and went fairly deeply into the current status of USC (West) basketball here. Those of us that don't live in the southeast tend to forget that to a lot of folks down there "USC" means "South Carolina." Is it possible that whoever tallied the votes saw "USC" and "South Carolina" and mistakenly thought those were different schools?

I hope so. Because if anybody gave Southern Cal a Top 25 vote then they should have their voting privileges revoked.

That said, there are always a lot of silly votes in the first Top 25 votes of the season, in both college basketball and football. Cornell? Creighton? San Diego State? Why do voters feel the need to stick their favorite local team into 25th spot in their poll when they know without a doubt that those teams are not among the 25 best in the nation?

Maryland, Illinois and Vanderbilt were all teams that failed to make the Top 25, and teams that folks could have (and did) vote for. How many points would Maryland give in Las Vegas against Cornell on a neutral court right now? 12? 15? What about some of the teams that didn't even get a single vote in the Top 25? 55 teams received at least one vote in the Coaches Poll, yet Virginia (an 11 seed in my most recent BP65), Cincinnati (an 8 seed), Wisconsin (a 7 seed), Baylor (a 10 seed) and Arizona State (a 10 seed) received a grand total of zero votes. That's a joke.

Now, I don't have any of those five teams I just listed as one of the Top 25 teams in the country, so I wouldn't have voted for any of them. But if 35 or 40 teams are getting votes, then those five teams deserve some of them. Would any of those people who voted for Creighton bet on them to beat Baylor tomorrow? Unlikely.

I understand that the coaches (or more realistically, random athletic department officials) don't really take these polls seriously, so they see no problem with throwing a couple of votes to teams that they like at the end of their Top 25. But then stop letting them vote. There are plenty of people who know how to rank teams. Let's get some of them some press, and let's stop giving so much press to votes cast by people who don't care and don't pay attention to any team outside their conference.