Winners and Losers of AP College Basketball Top 25 Poll in Week 5

With the No. 1 and No. 2 teams both losing in the same week, the first time since Duke and Michigan did so in mid-January 2013, former No. 3 Michigan State is the new No. 1 team in the AP Top 25.

More on the Spartans in a bit, but would you believe that this is the latest into any season that they have been ranked No. 1 since the 2000-01 season?

Elsewhere, it was a big week for the Big 12, as Kansas (No. 2), Iowa State (No. 4), Oklahoma (No. 7), West Virginia (No. 14) and Baylor (No. 16) give the conference the bragging rights of having 50 percent of its teams ranked in the top five percent nationally.

Things weren't nearly as good for the SEC, responsible for three of the 10 losses suffered by teams ranked last Monday.

Read on for the full list of this week's biggest winners and losers of the AP Top 25.

Winner: Michigan State Spartans

Mike Carter-USA TODAY Sports

It must be a pretty great week to be an alumnus of Michigan State. Not only did the Spartans' football team secure a spot in the College Football Playoff, but their basketball team also ascended to the top spot in this week's AP Top 25.

The recruiting world spent much of this past offseason swooning over MSU's 2016 class of freshmen, but let's be sure not to overlook what the Spartans have on hand right now. Everyone knows about nightly triple-double threat Denzel Valentine and everyone's learning about veteran three-point assassin Bryn Forbes, but the unsung hero for Tom Izzo's bunch has been 2015 McDonald's All-American Deyonta Davis.

Davis is third on the team in both points and rebounds and has more than twice as many blocks as any other Spartan. He's averaging slightly less than 20 minutes per game but is putting up 9.9 points, 6.1 rebounds and 2.2 blocks in that limited playing time.

Once Gavin Schilling returns from injury, he, Davis and Matt Costello will give Michigan State one heck of a strong backcourt to anchor its incredible guard play.

Davis was a crucial contributor this past week against Louisville. While Valentine and Forbes went blow-for-blow with Damion Lee and Trey Lewis, Davis quietly had nine points, six rebounds and three blocks in the process of helping hold Louisville's entire frontcourt to just 13 points.

With Kentucky and Maryland both losing, Michigan State jumped from No. 3 to No. 1, earning 62 of the 65 first-place votes.

Loser: Syracuse Orange

Nick Wass/Associated Press

Wichita State still takes the cake for suffering three losses and multiple injuries during the final week of November, but Syracuse certainly gave the Shockers a run for their money as the biggest one-week loser in "AP Winners and Losers" history.

After four consecutive games of shooting 40.0 percent or better from three-point range and looking like one of the toughest teams to beat in the country, the Orange responded with consecutive losses in which they shot worse than 30.0 percent from downtown.

They scored just 58 points in a 70-possession loss at home against Wisconsin before a loss to Georgetown in which they trailed by a margin of 21 points early in the second half.

Freshmen Malachi Richardson and Tyler Lydon had been phenomenal in the first six games of the season, but they were a combination of invisible and unwatchable this week, combining for 21 points on 32 field-goal attempts.

Perhaps worse than the pair of losses, though, was the mid-week ruling that Jim Boeheim's nine-game suspension—originally levied to begin at the start of ACC play—was to start immediately.

"We play Syracuse basketball," said interim head coach Mike Hopkins during his postgame press conference after the loss to Georgetown. "I could tell you what time we eat breakfast. We stuck to the script of what we do."

But as Rob Dauster of NBC Sports wrote after the game, it didn't really feel the same without Boeheim on the sideline.

The Orange should be able to bounce back quickly—their next five games are against Colgate, St. John's, Cornell, Montana State and Texas Southern—but no one was impressed with how they built on last week's big wins in the Battle 4 Atlantis. Syracuse was No. 14 in last week's AP Top 25 but dropped into the "Others receiving votes" category this week.

Winner: Baylor Bears

Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports

Prior to Sunday night, there was nothing impressive about Baylor's resume. The Bears had one road loss by a slim margin to a pretty good team (Oregon) and five home wins over teams with absolutely no hope of securing an at-large bid in the NCAA tournament.

Sure, they looked great against Savannah State and Prairie View A&M, but who hasn't? We desperately needed to see this team beat a quality opponent.

They delivered with a solid, come-from-behind win against Vanderbilt and subsequently jumped from No. 25 to No. 16 in the AP poll.

Taurean Prince (30 points) and Lester Medford (15 points and five assists) played absolutely nothing like the versions of themselves that showed up for the loss to Oregon while Rico Gathers paced the Bears to 20 offensive rebounds with eight of his own. Al Freeman struggled and Johnathan Motley was nowhere near as visible as usual, but the aforementioned trio did just enough to secure a crucial victory.

There's a lot of fodder remaining on this schedule, though. The Bears already have four embarrassingly weak home wins, and they still have four games remaining against Northwestern State, Texas Southern, New Mexico State and D-II Hardin-Simmons.

Right before the start of conference play, I'll be interested to see how huge the difference is between where Baylor ranks in RPI and where it ranks on KenPom.

Loser: The Middle Tier

Allan Henry-USA TODAY Sports

It was not a great week for teams previously ranked in the middle tier of the AP Top 25.

The top 12 teams did pretty well. No. 1 and No. 2 each suffered a relatively understandable road loss, but the rest of that group was completely unscathed. The previous week, the top nine teams went undefeated. Say what you will about parity in a season without a clear-cut No. 1 team, but the top 10 or so teams are really starting to assert their dominance.

Meanwhile, Nos. 19-25 fared pretty well, too. Arizona won at Gonzaga, Providence won at Rhode Island, and Baylor capped off the week in hoops with a big home win over Vanderbilt. The only team from this group to suffer a loss was Louisville, and the Cardinals' four-point loss at Michigan State actually helped them out.

But Nos. 13-18 took a bit of a beating.

As mentioned on a previous slide, Syracuse was the week's biggest loser, dropping out of the poll from No. 14 after a pair of losses. Gonzaga got 51 points and 27 rebounds out of Kyle Wiltjer and Domantas Sabonis and somehow lost at home to Arizona. Oregon, Vanderbilt and Texas A&M all suffered road losses while Cincinnati dropped a home game against Butler.

In total, the sextet combined for seven losses and dropped a combined 47 spots this week (counting unranked as No. 26 for both Syracuse and Texas A&M).

Winner: North Carolina Tar Heels

Bob Donnan-USA TODAY Sports

The collective decision to drop North Carolina all the way to No. 9 after the loss to Northern Iowa never made much sense.

Why penalize the Tar Heels for a loss without their most important player? No one truly believed that game was an accurate representation of what the team would be with Marcus Paige on the court, right? We have to appreciate the desire to reward teams who actually won games that week, but that much of a drop always felt like too harsh a punishment.

The AP voters were able to correct their error with an assist from Paige's 20 points in Tuesday night's win over previously No. 2 Maryland. Back at full strength, the Tar Heels proceeded to lay the smackdown on Davidson on Sunday night and were able to jump all the way back up to No. 3 in this week's poll.

Every bit as important as the return of Paige has been the continued emergence of sophomore guard Joel Berry II.

An afterthought in a recruiting class that featured Justin Jackson and Theo Pinson, Berry has at least three assists in every game this season and is shooting 37.5 percent from three-point range. It's hardly a coincidence that his worst game came in North Carolina's only loss, and it should be a blast to watch Berry and Paige coexist for the rest of the year.

Turnovers (15 in each game this week) have been a bit of an issue as the Tar Heels work to reassign roles and minutes with their leader back in the fold, but they are quickly reestablishing themselves as arguably the team to beat this season.

Loser: Maryland Terrapins

Gerry Broome/Associated Press

It's bad enough that Maryland suffered its first loss of the season, dropping four spots from No. 2 to No. 6. But it adds a tangible amount of insult to injury to see a conference rival—as much as a team can have a rival in just its second season in the conference—to climb to No. 1 in the process.

Truth be told, the Terrapins looked pretty good for most of that loss to North Carolina. The first 10 minutes were an unmitigated disaster, fraught with sloppy turnovers, but they bounced back quite nicely in their first true road game of the season and really made a game out of what should have been a blowout.

A loss is a loss, though. Even if it did come on the road against the preseason No. 1 team that is just now healthy for the first time in years, the AP voters felt the need to punish the Terrapins.

This was supposed to be Maryland's year. Most had the Terrapins projected for a No. 1 seed to start the season and just about everyone had them winning the Big Ten.

Yet, less than a month after the season began, Maryland is already looking up at Michigan State and can no doubt feel Purdue breathing down the back of its neck. Things might get even worse this week as the Terrapins play a very difficult neutral-court game against Connecticut on Tuesday.

Winner: Butler Bulldogs

John Minchillo/Associated Press

Ranked in the preseason AP Top 25, Butler fell out of the poll after losing to red-hot Miami in the championship game of the Puerto Rico Tip-Off on Nov. 22.

Roosevelt Jones and company actually showed a lot of heart in the loss. Miami jumped out to a 25-9 lead less than nine minutes into the game, but the Bulldogs fought back and made things interesting. They just couldn't quite get it closer than four points in the eventual 85-75 defeat.

But they're back at No. 18 in the poll this week, thanks to an extremely impressive road win over Cincinnati. Prior to Butler's 78-76 win, the Bearcats had only allowed one opponent to score more than 76 points against them since the start of the 2012-13 season (a 97-84 win over Memphis in March 2014).

That alone should serve as a testament to how strong Butler's offense is this season. Kellen Dunham led the way with 24 points, but he was just one of five Bulldogs to score in double figures against one of the stingiest defenses in the nation.

Even excluding the statistical outlier of 144 points in the season opener against The Citadel, Butler has averaged 82.3 points per game this season. Factor that first game in and the average jumps to 91.1. The defense hasn't been great by any stretch of the imagination, but it looks like Butler will shoot its way to a lot of wins this season.

Loser: SEC

Mark Zerof-USA TODAY Sports

It was not a banner week for a conference looking to establish that it's more than just "Kentucky and the gang."

For starters, the flagship program lost to UCLA this week, dropping from No. 1 to No. 5 as a result.

It was an understandable loss. The Bruins were out for revenge after last year's blowout. Marcus Lee got hurt. Tyler Ulis was playing hurt. Alex Poythress and Skal Labissiere both dealt poorly with foul trouble. But it was still a loss for what was previously supposed to be the closest thing we had to an elite team this year.

With their leader falling on Thursday, Texas A&M and Vanderbilt followed suit over the weekend.

Like Kentucky's loss, Vanderbilt's was pretty forgivable. Though it was their second loss of the season, it's hard to fault the Commodores for a two-point loss on the road against another ranked team (Baylor).

Neither Damian Jones nor Luke Kornet ever got into a rhythm, and Baylor senior Taurean Prince set a new career high in scoring for the second time in three games. These things happen, and Vanderbilt didn't fall far, slipping from No. 16 to No. 21.

Texas A&M's loss to Arizona State, though, was pretty ugly.

Danuel House missed 12 three-point attempts by himself, Jalen Jones played equally miserably, and Tonny Trocha-Morelos—arguably the Aggies' MVP through the first six games of the season—was held scoreless. It was one of those losses that's really going to hurt both the computer resume and the eye test in March, and it caused them to drop out of the poll from No. 18.

Worst of all for the SEC: Where's the love for South Carolina?

I'm certainly not of the mindset that all 13 undefeated teams deserved to be ranked, but eight of them are in the top 20 while the Gamecocks received just 15 votes this week. Granted, they haven't played a murderer's row of opponents—neutral-court games against Hofstra and Tulsa are as good as it gets—but they're playing very well on both ends of the floor.

If SMU is a top 20 team for getting to 6-0 with little more than narrow wins over Yale and TCU, I'm not sure how the AP voters can rationalize leaving South Carolina out of the top 25.

Winner: UNLV Rebels

Rick Bowmer/Associated Press

Nobody saw this coming.

UNLV lost four of its five leading scorers from last season, and No. 6 from that list decided to transfer just two weeks into this season.

Yes, the Rebels were adding quite the collection of transfers and freshmen, but if the fifth-best recruiting class in the nation in 2014 merely yielded an 18-15 record, why buy stock in what was the 13th-best class this year?

As it turns out, that one key player who returned from last season is pretty darn good. Patrick McCaw is averaging 18.4 points, 4.1 assists, 3.6 rebounds and 3.1 steals per game while shooting 46.0 percent from three-point range. If you want a National Player of the Year candidate that no one is talking about, look no further.

In the season-altering win over Oregon on Friday night, though, McCaw was a minor cog in the machine. Freshman Stephen Zimmerman had 12 points, 12 rebounds and four blocks. Mercer transfer Ike Nwamu drained five three-pointers while Rutgers transfer Jerome Seagears had 16 points. Oregon transfer Ben Carter played with fire against his former team, chipping in 10 points and six rebounds off the bench.

Stud freshman Derrick Jones was a complete non-factor (seven minutes, zero points, three turnovers, three fouls), and the Rebels still beat the Ducks by a double-digit margin.

Factoring in the earlier win over Indiana in the Maui Invitational, UNLV received 40 votes this week after getting completely shut out seven days ago. It wasn't quite enough to crack into the AP Top 25, but the Rebels are loudly knocking on the door in advance of Wednesday's big game against Wichita State.

Loser: Duke Blue Devils

Gerry Broome/Associated Press

For a second consecutive week, the Blue Devils dropped a spot in the AP Top 25 for no good reason.

Two weeks ago, Duke had 1,238 votes and was ranked No. 6 in the nation. After smoking Yale and Utah State by a combined margin of 44 points, the Blue Devils' vote total increased to 1,253, but they were leapfrogged by Oklahoma.

They were dominant once again this week, slaughtering Indiana by a score of 94-74 before crushing Buffalo 82-59. This time, their vote count actually decreased to 1,243 as loathed rival North Carolina catapulted ahead of them.

So, to recap, Duke has won its last four games by a combined total of 87 points. The Blue Devils are on a six-game winning streak that includes four wins over teams in the KenPom top 100 and nary a game against a team outside the KenPom top 175. Yet, they dropped to No. 8 this week, even though they are very clearly playing their best basketball of the season now that Brandon Ingram is finally looking the part of a top-notch freshman.

No one will be pouring one out for poor Mike Krzyzewski and his turmoil of not being ranked highly enough in the top 10, but it's kind of messed up that this team keeps slipping while its play keeps improving.

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