A couple of Triangle-centric observations:
1. The next AP poll is important, because Duke is finally eligible for every voter's ballot. From January 7:
I would lend a small amount of support to Graham Couch's position if he were using it to keep Duke out of the top spot -- I have no road game bias, and would strongly consider putting Virginia or Michigan there myself -- but to leave them out of the Top 25 altogether is to ignore everything else and say that whatever the team has accomplished at home or in neutral sites simply doesn't count for anything. The poll breakdown is well-publicized these days; he would gain enough notoriety as an outlier by ranking them, say, #6. (Now that he's ranking Duke again, maybe he will.)Quote:
Beyond Duke, six teams who are on my top 25 ballot this week were initially ineligible when I began to not include teams who hadn’t yet played a true road game. The combined road record of those six teams since they began playing road games: 4-6. No. 1 Tennessee is 1-0, No. 6 Texas Tech (welcome back) 1-0, No. 7 Kansas 0-2, No. 8 Auburn 0-1, No. 11 Kentucky 1-1 and No. 20 Villanova 1-2. Winning on the road is so much harder than on neutral courts, and road games are telling of a team’s makeup and toughness and abilities beyond freakish athleticism. Duke might be the best team in the country. But 4-6 tells me we don’t really know what Duke is yet until the Blue Devils start playing on the road. Because they haven’t, at this point, its naive and unfair to celebrate them.
2. You may not want to hear this, but even after their 21-point home loss, there's a good chance that UNC will not drop too far in the rankings, if at all.
Sticking with the AP poll, here is how UNC and others fared:
#11 Auburn (1-1) lost at Ole Miss, won vs. Georgia
#12 UNC (1-1) won at #15 NC State, lost vs. Louisville
#13 FSU (1-1) won vs. Miami, lost vs. #1 Duke
#14 Mississippi State (0-2) lost at South Carolina, lost vs. Ole Miss
#15 NC State (1-1) lost vs. #12 UNC, won vs. Pittsburgh
#16 Ohio State (0-2) lost at Rutgers, lost at Iowa
#17 Houston (0-1) lost at Temple, plays Wichita State tonight
#18 Kentucky (1-0) won vs. Texas A&M, plays Vanderbilt tonight
#19 Buffalo (2-0) won vs. Toledo, won vs. Miami (OH)
#20 Iowa State (0-2) lost at Baylor, lost vs. Kansas State
#21 Marquette (2-0) won at Creighton, won vs. Seton Hall
The remaining ranked teams (Indiana, Oklahoma, St. John's, and TCU) each lost 1 or 2 games this week.
For UNC to move down, someone has to move up, and the best candidates are #18 Kentucky (pending the Vanderbilt game), #19 Buffalo, and #21 Marquette. None of those teams will have a recent victory as good-looking to voters as UNC's win in Raleigh. There is a stealth candidate -- unranked Ole Miss, who beat #11 Auburn and #14 Mississippi State, and sits atop the SEC at 3-0 and a 13-2 overall record -- but I see them definitely cracking the Top 20, maybe cracking the Top 15, and not displacing UNC.
A final thought: can UNC actually move up in the rankings? I hope not. #11 Auburn's loss doesn't look so bad now. #10 Nevada is playing at Fresno State tonight. The Top 9 teams have not lost so far this week, but I don't see UNC passing #2 Michigan, #5 Gonzaga, or #6 Michigan State even if they lose tonight or Sunday.