Winners and Losers from the AP College Basketball Top 25 Rankings in Week 6
The latest Associated Press Top 25 rankings for men's college basketball have been released, and the winners and losers were quite few and far between.
Aside from Butler free-falling from No. 15 to No. 23, not a single team in the Top 16 moved more than one rung up or down. That includes Kentucky remaining the unanimous No. 1 team in the country for a second straight week.
Michigan State was the only new arrival to the AP Top 25, but the Spartans actually received fewer votes this week than they did last week.
We didn't let it deter us, though.
The people want five winners and five losers every Monday morning, and darn it, we give the people what they want. So let's get this party started with the newest member of the Big Ten to reach the Top 25 and conclude it with a Big Ten team who curiously slipped a little bit this week.
Winner: Michigan State Spartans
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With North Carolina and Northern Iowa both losing this week, some team just outside the Top 25 was bound to get some extra votes simply for not losing.
Well, Georgetown, Illinois, Iowa and Seton Hall each suffered at least one loss after being ranked No. 27-30 in last week's poll, so it was the former No. 26 team that benefited nicely from doing next to nothing.
Michigan State played just one game this week—a home game against Oakland that the Spartans win 24 out of 25 times. Their vote count actually dropped from 120 to 116, but it's such a convoluted mess beyond the Top 23 that 116 was good enough for 25th place.
Does Michigan State really deserve to be ranked, though?
Kudos to the Spartans for playing four neutral-court games and two true road games already this season, but where are the quality wins? More on this on the next slide.
Loser: North Carolina Tar Heels
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This is the second week in a row that North Carolina is one of the biggest losers.
The Tar Heels only played one game this week and became the first team in the country to score at least 0.91 points per possession against Kentucky. In fact, they were substantially better on offense than any other team Kentucky has faced, registering 1.04 points per possession.
Too bad they gave up 1.25 points per possession and never really had any chance of winning the game, but the fact of the matter is they looked pretty impressive in a game that not many people actually expected them to win.
For their troubles, they nearly dropped out of the Top 25, receiving just 122 votes—down from 350 last Monday.
What's bizarre, though, is that the three-loss Tar Heels with 2.5 quality wins (the 0.5 being a neutral-court win over Davidson) are being viewed on the same plane as a three-loss team with no quality wins (Michigan State).
Were Michigan State's wins over Marquette and Loyola Chicago really as good as North Carolina's wins over Florida and UCLA?
If the argument for the Spartans is that they at least looked competitive in losing to three top-50 teams (Duke, Kansas and Notre Dame), why doesn't that same argument apply for North Carolina (Kentucky, Butler and Iowa)?
Winner: Notre Dame Fighting Irish
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Last week, five different teams jumped at least six spots in the rankings.
This week was much more sedated with only four ranked teams suffering losses—just two of those losses coming against unranked opponents. Thus, it's big news that Notre Dame jumped four spots and increased its vote total by 76 percent to 351.
The Fighting Irish still haven't played a true road game this season, but they protected their turf admirably this week in the form of a 26-point win over Mount St. Mary's and a 20-point win over Florida State. They're now 10-1 overall and sit atop the ACC standings with a 1-0 conference record.
Amazingly, Notre Dame destroyed both of those teams without getting much of anything out of Pat Connaughton. The senior shooting guard was averaging 14.1 PPG coming into this week but scored a total of 13 points in the two games combined.
But the Irish got a couple of great games out of Jerian Grant, Zach Auguste and Demetrius Jackson—proof positive that this team is going to be an absolute nightmare for ACC foes to defend. Notre Dame just wasn't the same last season without Grant, but it is ready to do some serious damage in its second year in the conference.
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Loser: Kansas Jayhawks
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After losing to Kentucky in the Champions Classic a few weeks ago, Kansas dropped six spots to No. 11, receiving 981 votes.
Since then, the Jayhawks are 7-0 with wins over Florida, Georgetown, Michigan State, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Utah—each of which is currently rated in the Top 100 on KenPom.com.
This week, while Duke and Virginia played nobody and Texas (vs. Texas State) and Wisconsin (at Milwaukee, vs. Nicholls State) effectively played nobody, Kansas really challenged itself with a road game against Georgetown and a "semi-home" game against Utah, winning them both.
Rather than steadily climbing back into the Top 5 during that incredible run, the Jayhawks are at No. 10 for a second straight week and only received 121 more votes than they did after getting absolutely embarrassed by Kentucky.
The Jayhawks are simply the unfortunate victim of top teams refusing to suffer bad losses. Until someone slips up, it seems they've reached a bit of a glass ceiling.
Winner: St. John's Red Storm
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Like Notre Dame, St. John's jumped four spots this week from No. 24 to No. 20.
The Red Storm weren't exactly challenged in playing home games against Fairleigh Dickinson and Fordham, but they certainly looked dominant while teams like Butler, North Carolina and Northern Iowa suffered losses.
Not enough people are talking about D'Angelo Harrison. The senior shooting guard scored at least 22 points in each of the last three games, playing at least 35 minutes in seven of the past eight. He now has 1,806 points in what has been a very impressive college career.
From the looks of things, he's going to finish his career with close to 2,300 points while finally getting a chance to play in the NCAA tournament.
Loser: California Golden Bears
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Some teams make winning look easy. Duke and Kentucky, for example, are 19-0 with 19 wins by double digits.
Others like California seem to prefer to just grind out wins.
In their last five games, the Golden Bears have scored 317 points on 323 possessions while playing four of those games against teams outside the Top 175, according to KenPom.com (subscription required). Each of those five games was won by 10 points or less. They needed two overtimes to beat Montana.
But, hey, they keep on winning. That's all that really matters. And they've been doing it without one of their best players, as Jabari Bird is recovering from a foot injury that has caused him to miss the past four games.
Like St. John's, California has just one loss against a very good team—in California's case, Texas—one key win away from home against Syracuse by double digits and one other key win against a team that probably deserves more respect than it gets—Wyoming for Cal and Minnesota for St. John's.
Yet, California still hasn't even cracked into the Top 30, let alone the Top 25. The Golden Bears received just 37 votes this week.
Winner: Penn State Nittany Lions
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There are nine teams in the country with at least 10 wins and fewer than two losses.
Six of those teams—Kentucky, Arizona, Wisconsin, Gonzaga, Maryland and Notre Dame—are ranked in the Top 20.
Two of those teams—Colorado State and TCU—got enough votes to be "ranked" in the Top 28.
Penn State is team No. 9 on that list, and the Nittany Lions only received three votes this week.
You might choose to view that as a slight against Penn State, but seriously, when was the last time Penn State got more AP votes in college basketball than Florida, Michigan and Syracuse combined?
Should the Nittany Lions have gotten a little more respect after a 13-point win over George Washington on Sunday? Probably. But this is a team that has only been ranked in one of the past 60 seasons—1995-96.
Seeing three votes next to Penn State's name is cause for a week-long celebration.
Loser: Butler Bulldogs
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Under normal circumstances, a road loss to Tennessee wouldn't have been a bad thing. According to OddsShark.com, Tennessee was actually favored by 1.5 points.
However, Butler really made a mess of things in the second half.
After jumping out to a 37-25 lead, the Bulldogs committed turnovers on five of six possessions and went nearly seven minutes without scoring a point. They proceeded to score just seven points in the final eight minutes of the game, letting a three-point lead turn into a 12-point loss.
It was the type of loss that made voters question whether Butler's season-defining win over North Carolina in November was really just a statement about the weakness of the Tar Heels.
Butler dropped from No. 15 to No. 23 but will get a chance to redeem itself on Saturday against in-state rival Indiana.
Winner: Washington Huskies
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If nothing else, Washington is some kind of scheduling evil genius.
The tip times for Washington's last three games: 10 ET on a Sunday night, 9 ET on a Sunday night and 8 ET on a Sunday night.
If you want the AP voters to watch what you're doing, forcing them to wait until your game is over to cast ballots is a pretty brilliant way to do it.
Until the final few minutes, it was looking like the voters were going to shake things up by dropping the Huskies for losing to Eastern Washington. But the Huskies stormed back to win the game and received 170 more votes than they did last week.
There's no Sunday game this week, but they do have an extremely intriguing neutral-court game against Oklahoma on Saturday night. That should determine once and for all just how good the Huskies might be this season.
Loser: Wisconsin Badgers
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The most wonderful time of the year can often be a difficult one for highly ranked teams. As Rob Dauster of NBCSports.com noted on Twitter, it's a whole lot easier for UNC-Wilmington to get pumped up about playing Louisville than it is for Louisville to get pumped up about playing UNC-Wilmington.
Between taking and being done with finals, taking a break from the routine of going to classes and looking forward to spending some holiday time with family, it takes a whole lot of focus to not look past some of these mid-December games that have long been penciled in on the calendar as W's.
Wisconsin, however, completely debunked that theory by winning at Milwaukee by 39 before beating Nicholls State at home by 43.
Sam Dekker is finally starting to look healthy, as he scored 17 in each of those blowouts.
Wisconsin was No. 5 last week but was only three votes behind Louisville.
Despite looking completely unstoppable, the Badgers remain at No. 5 and are now 18 votes behind the Cardinals. How did anyone watch Louisville's game against UNC-Wilmington and come to the conclusion that the Cardinals are better than Wisconsin now than they were a week ago?
Kerry Miller covers college basketball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter @kerrancejames.
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