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AP Poll Released

I was going to say, "maybe the voter is new at watching college basketball", and then I read her bio.

Thuc Nhi Nguyen has covered UCLA for the Southern California News Group since 2016.

thuc-nhi-nguyen.jpg

$20 says she only saw the Uk vs Seton Hall score
 
love my UNC TAR HEELS!

!!!!!!!!!!!!! GO TAR HEELS !!!!!!!!!!!!
 
I raise you one. $20 she's only seen scores all season. I would be surprised if she's watched one game this season from beginning to end.
The rest of her list looks pretty solid though. I think she ranked the top 6 accordingly. Don't know about putting MSU ahead of Nevada though and she has Nova over ranked. This Graham Couch guy on the other hand... what an idiot. There is no way that guy deserves a vote and should be banned from sports writing.
 
The rest of her list looks pretty solid though. I think she ranked the top 6 accordingly. Don't know about putting MSU ahead of Nevada though and she has Nova over ranked. This Graham Couch guy on the other hand... what an idiot. There is no way that guy deserves a vote and should be banned from sports writing.
Yeah, I was just piling on her being a young asian female with an AP vote. Part jealousy, mixed with some chauvinist, and some bigotry mixed in.

Mostly just jealous.
 
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for those of us who refuse to give that guy clicks can you please tell us what his reasoning was?
In college basketball, so much is revealed about the character of a team on the road. So many road losses are better showings than celebrated home wins.

In no other sport is the home court worth so much to momentum, to confidence. In no other sport does a road team, so smooth and high a few nights earlier in its own building, so often look like a befuddled, haphazard mess. The contrast between home and road in college hoops is so severe, to not play on the road is to take advantage of a system that creates the appearance of a larger chasm than really exists between the haves and have-nots.

Kentucky, for example, is still ranked firmly in the top 25 and no one is batting an eye, even though the Wildcats have done nothing to deserve it — because they’d played seven home games against mid-and low-major competition, not a single true road game, and coasted on their brand and the inattentive eyes of voters. Meanwhile, a team like San Francisco isn’t ranked, even though if you watched San Francisco play Buffalo in Belfast, Northern Ireland last week (I mean, who didn’t?), you’d know the Dons are a stronger team than Kentucky right now.

To avoid playing on another team’s campus altogether is a sin of cowardice and ego that eventually can’t be ignored — like when we’re more than a month into the college basketball season. So this week I removed Duke, Kansas, Tennessee, Auburn, Texas Tech, Kentucky, Villanova and Texas from my Associated Press top 25 ballot. That’s No. 1 Kansas, No. 2 Duke and No. 3 Tennessee, as other voters deemed them this week, so clearly I had an impact. I didn’t even put them through the paces of an evaluation. Because, while in some cases they have impressive neutral-site wins, they aren’t playing the same game as the rest of college basketball. They haven’t yet been tested in a true road game.


It’s a standard of fairness I’ve chosen to set. I did so last year, too, removing a couple of these same teams. As soon as they play a true road game, they’ll be back on my ballot. No penalty. No need to climb over other teams. It should never be that way. Every week should be a fresh analysis of everyone. Tennessee, after it plays at Memphis on Saturday, might be my No. 1 next week. When Kansas rejoins the rest of society in two weeks, the Jayhawks could be deserving of No. 1. They might be now. But you don’t really know that when they’re busy dodging true road games. So, for this week, they’re out.

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If you’re just discovering my AP ballot — I’m just one of 65 voters — you probably haven’t had an issue before. Your team might have been one to benefit from some basic principles I’ve put in place. Like Duke did last year, ironically. The Blue Devils’ road results then, including a tough road defeat at Boston College for which most voters naively and unfairly dinged them, is part of what prompted me to add this hard-line standard to my rankings.

Teams know their neutral-site scheduling commitments and their mandated home games in events like the ACC-Big Ten challenge. These schools who aren’t going on the road, they’re behemoths of the sport. Take your butts on the road for a game. Find out about your kids in an unfriendly atmosphere, when things start to go wrong. It’s entirely your choice. For a lot of schools, it isn’t. And so when you don’t and the rest do, how do you evaluate everyone on the same plane, when there’s one large element of the evaluation that certain schools aren’t taking part in?

I don’t want to hear the argument that the NCAA tournament is played on neutral courts, so the road doesn’t matter. The Super Bowl is played on a neutral field, too. But if the New England Patriots got to play their first 8 games at home and the Kansas City Chiefs played three of their first eight on the road, we’d all cry foul.

Yet in college basketball, folks congratulate coaches on wins that mean nothing. Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski is deservedly a legend. But if you gave my mother Zion Williamson, R.J. Barrett, the Cameron Crazies and an undeniable home whistle, she might go unbeaten, too.

Duke doesn’t play a road game until Jan. 8 at Wake Forest — more than two months after opening the season in the Champions Classic. Kentucky, Texas Tech and Texas don’t step foot on another campus until the new year, either. At the very least, that’s as absurd as me removing them from my rankings.

If you disagree, feel free to email me (gcouch@lsj.com) or tweet at me (@Graham_Couch), but do so only after you email or tweet at your spineless coach, whose fear of the road makes my point. Or whose arrogance deserves to be admonished.

Here’s my AP top 25 ballot for this week:

1. Gonzaga
2. Michigan
3. Nevada
4. Virginia
5. Buffalo
6. Michigan State
7. Wisconsin
8. North Carolina
9. Florida State
10. Ohio State
11. Nebraska
12. Virginia Tech
13. Iowa
14. Arizona State
15. Mississippi State
16. Maryland
17. Houston
18. Cincinnati
19. Furman
20. Marquette
21. San Francisco
22. Syracuse
23. Oklahoma
24. Indiana
25. St. John’s
 
Graham Couch is really a ****ing idiot . Does he realize that UVA's only away game so far was at Maryland? This was scheduled as part of the ACC/B1G challenge. So he lambastes Duke who got scheduled a home game in the challenge but has no issue with UVA who got scheduled an away game? It's not like UVA scheduled the away game themselves.
 
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Thinking about e-mailing Graham Couch and including some of the posts ITT as part of the content. Just curious to see if he'll respond.
 
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I don't have a problem punishing teams like Nevada or Gonzaga if they don't play a tough non conference schedule with road games since they won't be tested in their conference.

But, to give it to teams like Duke, Kansas and Tennessee who have all played very tough (and profitable) neutral site non conference games and will go on to play very tough road games essentially every week for 2 months starting in January is pretty ridiculous.
 
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