Here we go, with my second installment of what I think the Top 25 should look like, basically. First off, nary a glance was made towards either last week's ballot I submitted, or the end-result of Week One. I don't believe in moving teams "up" or "down", so much as merely reevaluating every week in an effort to determine, roughly, the Top 25 teams in the country.
Again, I heavily used KenPom and Sagarin (his predictor this time, though) to get to my final ballot. Sagarin's ballot, at the time of publishing, was yet to be updated for Sunday's games, so I kind of had to approximate. Later on, when those numbers become official, I'll post what the poll would've been like without any human input.
With that said, here's the poll. My reasoning for the picks after the jump...
Rank | Team | Delta |
---|---|---|
1 | Connecticut | |
2 | North Carolina | 1 |
3 | Pittsburgh | 1 |
4 | Oklahoma | 2 |
5 | Memphis | |
6 | Missouri | 4 |
7 | Michigan St. | 1 |
8 | Arizona St. | 13 |
9 | Duke | 7 |
10 | West Virginia | 1 |
11 | Kansas | 6 |
12 | Gonzaga | 6 |
13 | UCLA | 4 |
14 | Brigham Young | 11 |
15 | Louisville | 8 |
16 | Wake Forest | 3 |
17 | Villanova | 1 |
18 | Illinois | 6 |
19 | Washington | 3 |
20 | Purdue | 6 |
21 | Marquette | 2 |
22 | Xavier | 7 |
23 | Utah | |
24 | Clemson | 12 |
25 | Texas | |
Last week's ballot |
Because, more this time than last time, I used my own, human brain on some of these. Like, despite UCLA being ranked #7, I dropped them because of their two-loss week. West Virginia, the #6 team according to KenPom, was dropped to #10 because of their high-loss total (7, without a single bad loss, of course). Oklahoma was slid way, way up to #4, and that still might not be high enough for some of you. Their numbers aren't impressive, but they are 25-1. For the most part, though, I generally stayed around the same vicinity as the rankings. Wake might be lower than most, but their losses to NC State and Georgia Tech (who have a combined three non-Wake conference wins between the two, one of which was NC State over GT) are just absolutely awful. The Illinois-Washington-Purdue situation was terribly difficult to work out, for me; all are essentially identical, resume-wise. All are next to each other in KP, all are similar according to Sagarin, and all have similar resume's. I ended up favoring the Illini because of their season-sweep of the Boilermakers, and they beat Washington because of a lack of a bad loss (the Huskies' season-opening L to Portland, who is admittedly better than expected, coming back to bite them in the ass). Washington over Purdue was tricky, and it was mostly just a gut thing, really. I think the Huskies are a better team, so they got the nod at #20.
Any comments or criticisms or anything go in the comment section. Last week, we got some excellent points of view on plenty of different arguments. Hopefully, we can stimulate some more discussion with this one.
Editor's Note: K-State postgame content, and the Big 12 Roundup, will pop up sometime tomorrow, I promise. Just wait...