Here's some interesting information:
1. Texas 7-1 19-3
2. Kansas 6-2 15-6
3. Colorado 5-3 15-4
3. Oklahoma 5-3 14-5
3. Nebraska 5-3 15-6
4. Iowa State 4-4 14-7
4. Texas Tech 4-4 12-10
5. Kansas State 3-5 12-7
5. Oklahoma State 3-5 13-9
6. Texas A&M 3-6 13-7
7. Missouri 3-6 10-10
8. Baylor 1-7 1-7
Now someone please explain to me how we can be ahead of Colorado and Oklahoma in the league standings after beating both of them head to head, and not have a ranking while they hold on to theirs? Seriously. It's a freaking conspiracy.
On the plus side, Wichita State is finally getting some respect. They got a good mention on ESPN the other day, and picked up 6 votes in the ESPN poll. Not there yet, but it will be nice to see them in the NCAA tournament if they keep it up.
Good work guys. And good luck to Jim Wooldridge.
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8 comments:
Sorry, unless KU beats Texas, I don't think they should be in the poll quite yet..they just don't have the resume yet, only recently getting a NCAA worthy resume, after a lousy start to both the year and conference season.
And yopele...UNI destroyed Ind. St. this last week, it was Southern Illinois that lost to Indiana state, which by the way, just got Moss back (they lost him at the start of their losing streak)
UNI lost to Creighton @ Creighton, a very solid team.
C'mon Paul! The polls aren't supposed to reflect how good a team was, but how good a team is. Right now we're playing pretty well, and have the top defense in the country. Of course we started out weak. Our starting lineup has been 100% freshmen, sophomores who didn't play much last year, and a walk-on. It stands to reason they're getting better with experience. I'm still pulling for WSU though. They're the one team I'd root for against KU in the Championship game, if it ever comes to that. It would be unprecedented, to say the least.
Thanks for the correction, Paul. I would, however, say that your criteria of beating Texas before making it into the top 25 is asking a bit much. Most of the teams in the top 25 that have played Texas lost to Texas; and if beating Texas is a requirement, then the top 25 should comprise no more than 3 teams.
The fact is, discounting the first 7 games of the season, KU has certainly played like a top 25 team. It's record is 11-2; it handed Nebraska its worst loss ever; it has beaten several ranked teams; and lost all 6 of its games by a total of 25 points (the two games in this stretch by a total of 7). Show me another team that isn't ranked that has this type of resume. Better yet, show me the 25 superior resumes (from the last 13 games) in the top 25 .
I don't think they have to beat Texas to be ranked in the future, but as of now, I don't think they've had that many 'great' wins to counter-act the crappy losses they had early on...though they are getting closer (My point was, if Texas was in the current list, then they should be ranked)
KU has been really good -- they have a lot of talent, but they have been incredibly bad, losing when they really shouldn't have, and they've lost some bad games not that long ago.
I fully expect KU to be ranked soon, but I don't fault the pollsters at all for not ranking KU yet -- they only recently got their RPI above 60.
Even though there are several teams that don't deserve to be ranked, there are a few that should.
Ok, we're #22 now. Ready to be nice?
I guess I feel a bit differently about this than you guys. First of all, regardless of what the polls are intended to reflect, they do not reflect the best teams of the week. They've never really done that. Maybe they should, but the entire season has always been taken into effect. Otherwise, the polls would be much harder to make sense of. Teams would constantly be moving all over the place.
So, you might say, "then what's the point of the polls?" To which I would answer: "there is no point!" Sports polls in general are stupid, but at least in football they are used for a purpose, so it makes sense to pay attention to them, even if they are wrong. But in basketball, they're really there for the sole purpose of telling viewers who is supposed to be good and who isn't. Why should we care what they think? Its stupid.
But I don't believe that when you start the season 3-4 you should really be complaining about not getting respect. The people who make the polls are human and they don't watch every game. Of course they're going to look at the team's records. And up until recently our record was worse than most everyone above us. Did we have more talent than several of the ranked teams? Yes. But what had we done with it? Not much. But now we're on a roll, and the dopes who make the poll have ranked us again. So it all works out. But either way, if we take care of business, we're in the tourney and we can all drink and be merry.
I guess I'll make one more comment here. I don't see how the last two games (actually the two prior to the Oklahoma State one) definitively demonstrated that KU was a good enough team to now be receiving votes for the Power 16 when the wins were against teams still unlikely to make the tournament.
I think the truth of the matter is that Brad and I were actually right, and KU was being ignored by most voters. I mean, to effectively tell the team that beating Oklahoma won't get you into the rankings, but if you can beat Iowa State at Allen Field House then you've demonstrated that you're top 25 material. Bullshit!
Unless you are purely going by record (in which case Bucknell should be Top 10) or putting too much faith in computer-generated ranking systems (which don't account for early season blunders of youth, amongst many other factors, such as injury to a once powerful team), to claim that the recent victories of KU were what established that it is truly a poll worthy team is mere folly.
I'll say it again: if you don't watch the games, you won't be able to accurately judge the team. Some of the pollsters were apparently committing this error. (And here I'll acknowledge Jason's point that they can't watch every game, so I'll cut them a little slack - even though watching one game might have influenced their votes.) But at least they could have looked at any of the other factors I listed and concluded that maybe it was a better team than the one that lost its only game of the week. Of course they will acknowledge that KU is a good team now. Hindsight is always 20/20. But KU hasn't suddenly become a good team as a result of beating Nebraska or Iowa State.
If I really wanted to see the opinions (as analogously expressed by the votes in the polls) of either an uninformed or biased person, I could just ask for the opinion of an athletically-challenged spinster or, alternatively, that of my K-State-, Missouri- or MVC-fan friends. My biased friends will always shoot me straight and tell me how I've overlooked something that makes KU worse than what I think it is. And occasionally they will be right.
I think I have openly declared my own bias. And I acknowledge that all the points brought up in this discussion were valid (aside from the beating Texas one) though I agreed with few that weren't made by Brad or myself. I was merely asking the nearly impossible: That the top 25 teams in the nation be represented in the Top 25 poll.
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