Winners and Losers of AP College Basketball Top 25 Poll in Week 4

While the cream of the crop did a ton of winning this week, it was not a very fruitful seven days for the majority of teams ranked in the bottom 16 of last Monday's AP Top 25. Six of them (Indiana, California, Notre Dame, Connecticut, Wichita State, LSU) each suffered multiple losses, while five others dropped one game.

Long live early-season tournaments!

The Advocare Invitational was particularly batty with No. 17 Notre Dame, No. 20 Wichita State and Iowa (unranked but did receive 20 votes last week) cobbling together a combined record of 2-7, while Monmouth and Alabama won two games each.

But that tournament did produce Xavier—arguably the biggest winner of this week. Other tournaments to thank for big winners are the Battle 4 Atlantis (Syracuse), the Las Vegas Invitational (West Virginia), the Wooden Legacy (Michigan State and Providence) and the Maui Invitational (Kansas and Vanderbilt).

All in all, it ended up being one of those Mondays where pretty much anything goes. The top nine teams are pretty well set in stone, but the bottom 64 percent of the poll was extremely open to the interpretation of the 65 individual voters in the AP Top 25.

Read on for our full list of this week's biggest winners and losers.

Winner: Big East Conference

Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press

There were some individual teams seriously deserving of the top "Winner" spot, but how about the week the Big East had?

If we exclude the rather pathetic display by St. John's in the Maui Invitational, the Big East went a combined 19-1 in the past week—and the one loss was a game against Michigan State that Providence had an extremely good chance of winning until the final couple of minutes.

Let's focus on the good, though, and start with the run that Xavier is on right now. Building on last week's big road win over Michigan, the X-Men won four games this week, each by a double-digit margin. They plowed through Alabama and USC before destroying Dayton 90-61 in the Advocare Invitational championship. As a result of a dominant week, Xavier catapulted from No. 23 to No. 12.

Xavier wasn't the only Big East team to thrive in an early-season tournament. Villanova's defense suffocated both Stanford and Georgia Tech to win the NIT Tip-Off, Marquette sneaked past LSU and Arizona State to win the Legends Classic, and Creighton smoked Rutgers and Massachusetts to win the Men Who Speak Up Main Event.

Elsewhere, Providence almost won the Wooden Legacy, getting through Evansville and Arizona before coming up short against the Spartans.

Because of that strong week, Villanova is still No. 8, but its vote count increased from 1,153 to 1,218. Providence received just eight votes in last week's poll but debuts at No. 23 today. And while Creighton and Marquette still didn't receive any votes, they are certainly climbing onto everyone's radar.

The Big East even got some bonus air time this week when former members Syracuse and Connecticut squared off in the Battle 4 Atlantis, leading to plenty of reminiscing about the greatest conference tournament game ever played.

Loser: Wichita State Shockers

Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

In my three-year history of doing AP winners and losers, I cannot remember a team having anything close to a worse week than the one that Wichita State just endured.

It started on Monday when ESPN's Jeff Goodman reported that senior point guard Fred VanVleet was likely to miss the entire Advocare Invitational with a hamstring injury.

Buried in the eighth paragraph of Goodman's report was the news that backup freshman point guard Landry Shamet was likely to miss Thursday's game against USC while battling a stress reaction in his foot. But Paul Suellentrop of the Wichita Eagle later reported that Shamet is having surgery on the foot with an expected recovery time of 10-12 weeks.

All of a sudden, the Shockers were about to enter into a crucial stretch of the early season without two of their five most important players.

Adding more injury to injury, Anton Grady was at the center of a terrifying moment against Alabama on Friday. Grady collided with Dazon Ingram and lay on the court motionless for several minutes before getting carted off. Thankfully, the school announced he was released from the hospital on Sunday evening (via the Associated Press), but there's no telling when the critical transfer from Cleveland State will be able to get back on the court.

Playing all sorts of short-handed, the Shockers lost three consecutive games to USC, Alabama and Iowa, making it difficult to envision this preseason Top 10 team reaching the NCAA tournament without the Missouri Valley Conference automatic bid.

Injuries or not, Wichita State is 0-4 against D-I teams in Ken Pomeroy's top 300, and a home game against Utah on Dec. 12 is its only remaining contest against anything resembling a surefire tournament team. If they win out from here, perhaps the Shockers could absorb a loss in the MVC tournament and still make it to the big one, but it would be close.

Needless to say, they were nowhere to be found in this week's AP Top 25.

Winner: Syracuse Orange

Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports

Perhaps it's just going to be a thing this year that a new ACC team looks incredible each week? Two weeks ago was Miami's time to shine, but Syracuse took the cake this past week as the unlikely victor of the Battle 4 Atlantis.

That's no disrespect to the Orange. They were an unranked team in a field with three ranked teams (Connecticut, Gonzaga and Texas A&M) and a fourth (Michigan) that was ranked two weeks ago. They weren't nearly the long shot to win that Charlotte and Washington were, but no one outside of western New York actually expected this team to win three straight.

Yet, that's exactly what it did. The Orange took care of Charlotte before eking out extremely impressive wins over Connecticut and Texas A&M, improving to 6-0 on the season and earning the No. 14 spot in this week's AP Top 25.

Syracuse was on fire for the entire tournament, shooting 34-of-73 (46.6 percent) from three-point range. Freshmen Malachi Richardson and Tyler Lydon scored in double figures in all three games, as Lydon finished the Battle 4 Atlantis with 47 points, 28 rebounds and seven blocked shots.

If the Orange can stay hot for another week, a spot in next week's top 10 isn't even remotely out of the question. They host Wisconsin in the ACC/B1G Challenge before a good old-fashioned Big East grudge match at Georgetown on Saturday.

Moreover, the Orange scored a fairly big win off the court this week with the news on Wednesday that they'll be getting back one scholarship per year after winning an appeal of the NCAA's punishment. There's still no word on their appeal of the ruling that Jim Boeheim has to miss the first nine ACC games, but it was a pretty great week all the same.

Loser: Pac-12 Favorites

Ben Margot/Associated Press

When picking conference favorites during the offseason, most were debating between Arizona and California for the Pac-12. The former had won at least a share of three of the past five conference titles, and the latter was adding two of the best freshmen in the country.

Well, if what we saw on Thursday and Friday night was the best the Pac-12 has to offer, it's going to be a painful season for the Conference of Champions.

Cal went 0-2 in the Las Vegas Invitational. Ivan Rabb was the only Golden Bear who bothered to show up for the 72-58 loss to San Diego State, and defense was an unmitigated disaster the following night in the 94-90 loss to Richmond. The Golden Bears still have late-December games against Virginia and Davidson, but they had better show up for those games or else risk entering Selection Sunday without a single RPI Top 100 nonconference win.

Meanwhile, Arizona's play in the Wooden Legacy was even less inspiring.

The Wildcats needed overtime to beat a winless Santa Clara team that only had one player score more than six points. Granted, Jared Brownridge was unstoppable in scoring 44 for the Broncos, but that's an opponent Arizona should be able to beat by halftime. The Wildcats lost to Providence the following night, even though Kris Dunn and Rodney Bullock barely got to play because of foul trouble.

The good news for Arizona is that Ryan Anderson was an animal. He had 44 points and 23 rebounds between the two games. Virtually everyone else was a disappointment, though, as we found out just how much this team will struggle on nights when Gabe York isn't raining threes.

Arizona was ranked No. 11 last week but dropped all the way to No. 19. Cal was even less fortunate, slipping from No. 14 to receiving just 19 votes this week.

At least Oregon looks pretty good?

Winner: Kansas Jayhawks

Rick Bowmer/Associated Press

Much like Syracuse, it was an outstanding week both on and off the court for Kansas.

Let's start with the really big news: Cheick Diallo is finally cleared to play for the Jayhawks.

Why he was ineligible in the first place is an absolute joke. According to Rustin Dodd of the Kansas City Star, the "limited amount of extra benefits" that led the NCAA to suspend Diallo for five games amounted to $165.

Seriously.

Kansas spent over $100,000 fighting to get him eligible, and Diallo very well may have lost millions of dollars in draft stock because of a few bucks here and there that Tidiane Drame gave Diallo before officially becoming his legal guardian.

"I'm kind of mad because I've been suspended for five games," Diallo told Dodd. "I don't even know what I did. I don't even know."

Preach it. Even those of us who couldn't care less whether Kansas succeeds are quite upset with the way the NCAA handled the eligibility of the No. 5 overall recruit in this year's class, as ranked by 247Sports.

Diallo should have already been out there for the Jayhawks, but the prevailing sentiment is that we're now going to see an even better version of the team that just won the Maui Invitational with room to spare.

Led by Wayne Selden shooting 12-of-17 (70.6 percent) from three-point range, Kansas annihilated Chaminade and UCLA before a neutral-court victory over Vanderbilt that should still be one of the 25 most impressive wins of the season on Selection Sunday.

Last Monday, the Jayhawks were No. 5 with 1,243 votes. This week, they're No. 4 with 1,342 votes.

Loser: Indiana Hoosiers

Rick Bowmer/Associated Press

Hoosiers, you have a problem.

Last year, Indiana had a fantastic perimeter offense and little else. But with the addition of McDonald's All-American big man Thomas Bryant, things were supposed to be better. The Hoosiers were going to do a better job on the glass, as well as a better job in the paint on defense.

Or so we thought.

Thus far, those issues are nearly as bad as they were in 2014-15. According to KenPom.com, Indiana's opponents are shooting 48.8 percent from two-point range and scoring 60.0 percent of their points on two-point field goals—this compared to last year's marks of 50.9 and 57.8, respectively. Bryant is averaging 1.5 blocks per game, but it isn't doing much to dissuade opponents from trying to get to the rim.

The even bigger problem very much on display in the Maui Invitational is how brutally careless this team is with the ball.

The Hoosiers committed a total of 51 turnovers among the three games in Hawaii, including 21 in the loss to UNLV. James Blackmon averaged 2.1 turnovers per 40 minutes as a freshman, but that rate has nearly tripled to 5.9 this year. To a lesser extent, Troy Williams and Yogi Ferrell are also coughing up the ball at a higher rate than yesteryear.

It's bad enough that this team still isn't very good on defense, but Indiana is compounding the problem with a drastic uptick in empty offensive possessions.

Thanks to the losses to Wake Forest and UNLV—and at least partially thanks to the less than dominant win over St. John's—Indiana dropped out of the polls after climbing to No. 13 last week.

Winner: Vanderbilt Commodores

Rick Bowmer/Associated Press

Vanderbilt doesn't seem to care about conventional poll logic.

During the week of Nov. 16, the Commodores went 2-0 yet dropped two spots in the AP poll—partially because they needed overtime to win at home against Stony Brook and partially because teams such as Miami and Purdue were impressive enough to merit a fair amount of leapfrogging.

This week, on the other hand, Vanderbilt managed to climb three spots to No. 16 in the poll, despite suffering a loss.

Of course, this is because the Commodores looked extremely good in the Maui Invitational in the process of losing to one of the best teams in the country (Kansas).

They slaughtered St. John's in the quarterfinals, leading 29-5 after 10 minutes before putting it on cruise control for a 37-point win. The next day, they won 86-64 against a Wake Forest team that surrounded that blowout loss with wins over Indiana and UCLA.

Were it not for 6-of-27 three-point shooting as well as a monstrous game from Wayne Selden, the Commodores probably would have won the championship game against Kansas, too. They simply ran out of gas in the second half of that game.

Still, they had one of the best showings by any team in an early-season tournament, looking very much the part of a team that will challenge Kentucky for the SEC regular-season crown. Led by Damian Jones and Luke Kornet in the paint and what has thus far been efficient, turnover-free play from the young backcourt, Vanderbilt could make a lot of noise this year.

Loser: Miami Hurricanes

Ricardo Arduengo/Associated Press

After Miami beat Louisiana-Lafayette, Mississippi State, Utah and Butler in a span of seven days by a combined total of 76 points, we were all excited to find out what it would do for an encore.

Based on what the Hurricanes did last season, though, losing at home to Northeastern sounds about right.

In 2014-15, Miami got out to a hot start, ascending to No. 15 in the AP poll before losing three games by double-digit margins in just over two weeks' time.

At least the Hurricanes didn't lose by double digits this time, but they did respond to jumping to No. 15 in the AP poll by suffering an inexplicable home loss to a team from the Colonial Athletic Association.

Credit where it's due: Northeastern shot the lights out on Friday evening, going 12-of-22 from three-point range. But that's already becoming a disturbing trend for Miami, as Mississippi State, Utah and Butler shot a combined 41.0 percent from downtown against Miami in the Charleston Classic.

The big difference is the Hurricanes were unable to return the favor. After shooting an absurd 39-of-77 (50.6 percent) from three-point range in the previous four games, the 6-of-17 (35.3 percent) performance against Northeastern felt like a massive disappointment.

Such is life for teams that aren't particularly proficient with their perimeter defense. When they're hitting shots, the Hurricanes can beat anyone. When they aren't, they're liable to lose to just about anyone.

They only slipped six spots to No. 21 in this week's AP Top 25. Given the way things unraveled last year, though, we're officially intrigued to see how well Miami responds with extremely winnable games against Nebraska and Charlotte this week.

Winner: Elite Teams

Joel Auerbach/Getty Images

As tends to be the case at the apex of the early-season tournament bonanza, it felt like ranked teams were dropping on an hourly basis. Ranked teams suffered a grand total of 18 losses in the past seven days.

The best of the best, however, were unscathed.

The top nine teams in last week's poll (Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan State, Iowa State, Kansas, Duke, Oklahoma, Villanova and North Carolina) went a combined 23-0 with Kansas' 70-63 win over Vanderbilt serving as the only one that wasn't decided by a double-digit margin.

As a result, the gap between No. 9 North Carolina and No. 10 Virginia is 190 votes. The AP voters certainly don't all agree on the order of the top nine teams, but if we were simply listing the nine best teams in the country in alphabetical order, the agreement would be all but unanimous.

Yes, there was a ton of chaos among the teams previously projected for Nos. 3, 4 and 5 seeds, but there were no real changes to the teams that will be expected to advance to the regional semifinals in March.

Loser: LSU Tigers (and the NCAA Tournament)

Kathy Willens/Associated Press

There isn't a more gifted player in the country than LSU's Ben Simmons.

The likely No. 1 pick in the 2016 NBA draft is currently averaging 16.2 points, 14.4 rebounds, 6.2 assists, 2.2 steals and 1.4 blocks per game. He's two points away from leading the team in all five categories. Pretty much the only complaint that anyone has about the freshman point forward is that he doesn't call his own number frequently enough.

However, unless the NCAA changed the selection process without our knowledge, it's starting to look like Simmons and the rest of the Tigers could miss the Big Dance. That's because, for some bizarre reason, LSU signed the best player in the world and decided to schedule way too many opponents that aren't even worthy of being televised.

Save for the late January home game against Oklahoma in the SEC-Big 12 Challenge, LSU has a laughably weak nonconference schedule. In the Legends Classic this past week, the Tigers already played (and lost to) the two best teams they'll play this calendar year—and it's not like Marquette and NC State are exactly locks for the NCAA tournament, either.

As a result of those not-so-stellar losses, the Tigers vanished from the polls. They were No. 22 with 285 votes last Monday but received just two votes this week.

Forget about the AP poll, though. If you're rooting for Simmons to reach the tournament, circle the first week of January on your calendar. LSU opens SEC play with games at Vanderbilt and at home against Kentucky in what are probably the two best remaining chances to pick up a much-needed marquee win.

Kerry Miller covers college basketball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter @kerrancejames.