Fighter of the Nightman
- Chicago, IL
I love the AP Poll, warts and all - it's nostalgic and one of the few remaining counterweights to a more analytics-obsessed perspective (rapidly gaining in popularity) where I feel not enough credit is given to the types of teams that do more with less and find ways to win. With that said, this has always been my biggest issue with how the rankings work, and it's glaring in this week's poll. The voters seem to use a quasi-ladder approach to ranking teams; win and move up, lose and move down. They are rarely, if ever, ACTUALLY just ranking who they think the top 25 best teams are in order ... and I am okay with that!! Part of the nostalgia, lol. However, it makes ZERO sense to both reward a team for winning AND punish a team for losing too far in either direction.
I can't count the number of times I have seen (especially in hoops) the #5 team lose at an unranked team that was receiving votes or something, and then something like the following takes place:
(A) #5 team drops to like #17 because "clearly they aren't a top 5 team if they're losing to that unranked team."
(B) Unranked team skyrockets up to #20 because "clearly we didn't realize how good this team actually was, and they just proved themselves."
Either it was an impressive upset BECAUSE the higher-ranked team is STILL a very good team (and thus shouldn't drop that far for one loss to a team we now think is good) or it was an embarrassing defeat that "exposed" the higher-ranked team but didn't really necessarily indicate that the team who got the upset was that good. So, I ask this ... and maybe there is a legitimate answer.
What could we have done in the voters' eyes to stay at #17? If we had beaten OSU, I guarantee you that we would have skyrocketed to the top 10 ... and rightfully so. As things stand, we scored more points on a historically good OSU defense than anyone so far this year, and a what was a 20-10 game midway through the fourth quarter turned into a 34-16 OSU win after they made us pay for our mistakes. Sorry, but to me that is exactly what we should expect if OSU is the true #1 and they go on the road to play a team who should be ranked in the #20-25 range. Instead, we dropped more than 8 spots. Lol, I get it if we laid an egg like at Indiana, but we didn't ... and Indiana only looks more elite by the day! Not to mention the absurdity of having USC 5+ spots in front of us after we beat them and have just as impressive of a resume to-date. People can talk about "2 losses!" all they want, but it isn't our fault that we had two teams who are now proving to be among the top three in the nation on our schedule in the first half, haha.
I know it "doesn't matter" (I find it really weird and annoying how often people who DON'T care about something feel the need to try to get OTHERS to not care, too ... has a very "misery loves company" vibe to it that is quite off-putting), but it is annoying nonetheless. The pollsters did not find it reasonable to not rank us after the IU blowout loss, so anyone still bringing that up is off-base, IMO, not to mention with how great Indiana has continued to look. This kind of reminds me of during the 2023-24 basketball season when SO many people were saying things like, "I just don't know if this is a #3 seed team" without looking around at what OTHER teams are more deserving than we are ... looking at this through an Illini-centric pessimistic POV is kind of dumb when the argument you ACTUALLY need to make is that Nebraska deserves the #25 spot over us.
I can't count the number of times I have seen (especially in hoops) the #5 team lose at an unranked team that was receiving votes or something, and then something like the following takes place:
(A) #5 team drops to like #17 because "clearly they aren't a top 5 team if they're losing to that unranked team."
(B) Unranked team skyrockets up to #20 because "clearly we didn't realize how good this team actually was, and they just proved themselves."
Either it was an impressive upset BECAUSE the higher-ranked team is STILL a very good team (and thus shouldn't drop that far for one loss to a team we now think is good) or it was an embarrassing defeat that "exposed" the higher-ranked team but didn't really necessarily indicate that the team who got the upset was that good. So, I ask this ... and maybe there is a legitimate answer.
What could we have done in the voters' eyes to stay at #17? If we had beaten OSU, I guarantee you that we would have skyrocketed to the top 10 ... and rightfully so. As things stand, we scored more points on a historically good OSU defense than anyone so far this year, and a what was a 20-10 game midway through the fourth quarter turned into a 34-16 OSU win after they made us pay for our mistakes. Sorry, but to me that is exactly what we should expect if OSU is the true #1 and they go on the road to play a team who should be ranked in the #20-25 range. Instead, we dropped more than 8 spots. Lol, I get it if we laid an egg like at Indiana, but we didn't ... and Indiana only looks more elite by the day! Not to mention the absurdity of having USC 5+ spots in front of us after we beat them and have just as impressive of a resume to-date. People can talk about "2 losses!" all they want, but it isn't our fault that we had two teams who are now proving to be among the top three in the nation on our schedule in the first half, haha.
I know it "doesn't matter" (I find it really weird and annoying how often people who DON'T care about something feel the need to try to get OTHERS to not care, too ... has a very "misery loves company" vibe to it that is quite off-putting), but it is annoying nonetheless. The pollsters did not find it reasonable to not rank us after the IU blowout loss, so anyone still bringing that up is off-base, IMO, not to mention with how great Indiana has continued to look. This kind of reminds me of during the 2023-24 basketball season when SO many people were saying things like, "I just don't know if this is a #3 seed team" without looking around at what OTHER teams are more deserving than we are ... looking at this through an Illini-centric pessimistic POV is kind of dumb when the argument you ACTUALLY need to make is that Nebraska deserves the #25 spot over us.
