When I look at our ranking I can't get too upset. We've only played one top 25 team so far (and lost), and our other 2 losses were to teams in the KenPom 50-75 range. 5 of our 11 wins are against bad teams.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is shaping up to be a really, really good season, but Illinois hasn't really shown much to the rest of the country. Yet.
I think that’s a fair way to look at it, but there are two alternatives:
1) Are there 24 teams who look better than the Illini? Absolutely not, but we all know this isn’t how the polls work; they’re a points system where your weekly results bump you up from where you were, unfortunately.
2) Should we have fallen from #14 to unranked after a week where we went 1-1 on neutral courts? And, even if you think we should have just barely fallen out due to the Cincinnati loss alone, we are 9-1 (4-0 in B1G) since, with our only loss being a nail biter to a top 10 team. Effectively, people/the voters shouldn’t be acting like we are coming out of nowhere but instead recognizing that we are “back to normal” as a top 15 team.
I favor that second perspective. The Cincinnati loss was bad, but we should have stayed ranked, IMO. The voters only dropped us four spots for losing to Marquette, but they dropped us ELEVEN spots for losing to Cincy and beating KSU. We have been receiving votes for like a month and a half until yesterday, and all we have been doing is winning, haha.
I think if you think we deserved the boot after Cincinnati, #25 is fine for now. However, if you think we shouldn’t have, that’s where this frustration of seemingly being just outside the top 25 no matter how much we win is coming from. Given the treatment preseason hyped teams like Alabama are getting, I favor the latter perspective.
One thing we can all agree on, though, is that winning is the most important and will only improve our ranking! Win these next four (at UNL, vs. UM, vs. #7 PU and at UMD), and our Tuesday 1/25 matchup vs. #10 MSU will be prime viewing featuring two very highly ranked teams!