Staff Blog
Bloggers, Unlike the Associated Press, do not respect Nova
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Villanova is coming off a Sweet 16 finish, they play in the nation’s toughest conference, and are returning their entire rotation. They’re loaded at guard and experienced in the frontcourt, they have high expectation. This was enough to convince both major college basketball polls to place the Wildcats at 23 with enough points not to be in jeopardy of falling out of the rankings.
Bloggers, apparently, are a bit harder to convince. AOL’s excellent Fanhouse has put together a BlogPoll based on the rankings by their various college bloggers. Unlike the mainstream polls, Villanova did not make the cut.
Here are the teams that FanHouse ranked above Nova and the AP did not. All links go to FanHouse explanations:
Syracuse (Fanhouse: 25, AP: unranked)
LSU (Fanhouse: 23, AP: unranked)
Saint Mary’s (Fanhouse: 19, AP: unranked)
UNLV (Fanhouse: 18, AP: unranked)
I reached out to Randy Kim, FanHouse’s executive producer, to try to figure out why, or what happened. It turns out the slight isn’t as bad as we originally thought. Here’s Kim:
Villanova wound up ranked No. 26 in our BlogPoll and actually missed the Top 25 by one vote. They were ranked as high as No. 21 by one voter.
Still, leaving ‘Nova off is a telling statement. The difference between 23 and 26 may not sound huge, but in college basketball it’s everything.
Media voters are presumably more susceptible to inertia than bloggers trying to make a name for themselves, but that can cut both ways when it comes to rankings. It’ll be interesting to take a look back at the respective polls towards the end of the year and see which group was more tuned in.
Personally, I think they’re both crazy: ‘Nova is winning the chip.
