Okay, I looked myself. Last week, 25 pollsters had USC ranked but not Illinois, and 3 pollsters had Illinois ranked, but not USC.How many of them had USC on their ballots? Because yeah, that could actually end up being a bigger shift than we're thinking.
I did a little exercise. I took the results of last week's votes and did the following:
1. I treated USC and Illinois as being ranked 26th if they were not included on s person's ballot.
2. If Illinois was ranked higher than USC last week, I moved Illinois up one spot.
3. If Illinois was ranked lower than USC, I just averaged their two spots in that person's poll (then rounded down to be conservative).
4. If both were unranked, I just left Illinois unranked.
After doing that, I came up with a vote point total of 261 points. Which would put them at 21st in the polls based on last week's point distribution. This makes sense both visually (eye test) and statistically (we're basically swapping with USC).
Personally, I think we'll get more than 261 points, because I have a feeling some of the voters will over compensate not ranking Illinois last week. But not enough to jump into top 20. The point spread between 21 and 20 last week was like 200 points.