Good Morning, Illini Nation: Diving deep into this week's AP Top 25
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Welcome to "Good Morning, Illini Nation," your daily dose of college basketball news from Illini beat writer and AP Top 25 voter Scott Richey. He'll offer up insights every morning on Brad Underwood's team and college basketball at large:
The college basketball season has hit a stage where landing on enough teams, or at least the "right" teams, to fill out an Associated Press Top 25 ballot has become challenging.
Especially this season. The only two teams that didn't move in this week's latest AP poll were Connecticut and Purdue at the top. The other 23 spots featured a different team Monday afternoon than they did a week ago.
Voting in the AP Top 25 at this point of the season — and in a season where there are plenty of good teams and far, far fewer great ones — has become part science and part art. Let's just say trying to apply the transitive property of whom beat whom would generate an endless circle.
Body of work matters. Recent results matter. Advanced metrics matter. The eye test matters.
Then you throw it all together and come up with a ranking of 25 teams that will generally be derided by the college basketball public. I'm certainly interested in which fan base led the charge against me last week when I wound up with the lowest-rated ballot on CollegePollTracker.com. It's a terrific site chock full of interesting ways to view the AP poll and has served as a reminder to this voter to not take so many down votes personally.
Illinois was one of the 23 teams on the move in this week's top 25. So let's dive a little deeper on how the Illini (14-4, 5-2 Big Ten) wound up moving up four spots to No. 10.
Illinois' ranking reverted back to consensus this week after Brad Underwood's squad was left off a pair of ballots a week prior following a Quad III home loss to Maryland. But being a unanimously-ranked team didn't come with a shared view on where to slot the Illini on a ballot.
Three voters had Illinois as high as No. 8, meaning the Syracuse (N.Y.) Post-Standard's Donna Ditota, the Harrisonburg (Va.) Daily News-Record's Shane Mettlen and Zach Klein out of WSB-TV in Atlanta are the new fan favorites among the Illini faithful. Illinois also received at least one vote from Nos. 9-15, 17-18, 21 and 25.
Illinois' appearance on all 61 ballots submitted this week means the Illini give up what's been their oft-held status this season as the top-ranked team not on every ballot. That "honor" belonged to Arizona this week, with the No. 9 Wildcats on every ballot but the one from the Chicago Sun-Times' Steve Greenberg.
The unranked team getting the most level in terms of highest single vote was Texas, which appeared at No. 16 on the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News' Jon Wilner's ballot. The Longhorns did beat then No. 9 Baylor on Saturday, but also lost to unranked UCF last week and have dropped three of their last five games.
My ballot this week wasn't among the "most extreme" at CollegePollTracker, but I did slot a handful of teams either five spots higher or five spots lower than their actual ranking. I'm riding for the mid-majors.
Just one other voter had Dayton higher than I did with the Flyers at No. 10 based on the strength of their 12-game winning streak and 6-2 record in the first two quadrants. And no one voted for New Mexico higher than my vote at No. 15 for a Lobos team that has two Quad I wins in their last three outings.
A little recency bias perhaps. But it's part and parcel of filling out an AP Top 25 ballot every week during a season that's shown any team can lose to anyone and anywhere. Should make March even more mad.