College sports and poll rankings have had a longstanding, sometimes complicated relationship. Arizona men’s basketball is finding that out the hard way lately.
Polls have been the decider for college football in years past. Before the Playoff and before the BCS, the AP Top 25 and USA TODAY polls determined the champion.
In college basketball, the NCAA Tournament always overrules the polls by the end of the year. On a week-to-week basis, the polls are updated like college football. There’s often a lot of reshuffling due to the chaotic nature of the sport.
Arizona has been one of the best teams in college basketball this season. The ninth-ranked Wildcats are 14-4 on the year. Last week, they defeated the USC Trojans and UCLA Bruins in succession. So surely, those victories would put them on the map for everyone.
Not so much. For the second consecutive week, an AP poll voter omitted Arizona from their ballot. Andrew Weatherman, formerly a student manager at Duke University, emerged on Monday afternoon to clarify the situation.
“Btw, this is the second week in a row that a voter forgot to rank Arizona. The AP Poll needs a serious accountability overhaul,” Weatherman posted on X, the website formerly known as Twitter.
Btw, this is the second week in a row that a voter forgot to rank Arizona.
The AP Poll needs a serious accountability overhaul.
— Andrew Weatherman (@andreweatherman) January 22, 2024
What makes this even more curious is that it would have been mostly ineffectual if the voter had ranked the Wildcats. Arizona held a 1,080 to 862 lead over 10th-ranked Illinois in the poll, even with the voter’s omission.
At least it didn’t appear to be a misclick.
About Chris Novak
Chris Novak has been talking and writing about sports ever since he can remember. Previously, Novak wrote for and managed sites in the SB Nation network for nearly a decade from 2013-2022