College basketball needs to rethink its rankings.
If you followed CBS Sports’s now-defunct weekly “Poll Attacks” column by Gary Parrish over the years, you know that the journalists voting in the men’s AP top 25 poll make some rather baffling rankings decisions. One such “attack” pointed out a voter who moved Michigan State up in his ballot from the previous week while the Spartans were on a three-game losing streak. Another noted a voter had put Texas Tech seven spots behind a Northwestern team it had beaten by 36 that week. Parrish retired the column because, in his words, he “felt like [he] was writing about the same careless people/mistakes every week.”
While obvious, these “careless” ballots aren’t the AP poll’s biggest problem. It’s far too heavily anchored on the previous week’s rankings and preseason expectations, creating a top 25 that feels more detached from the reality on the court every week. It has become nothing more than a symbolic number next to the names of 25 teams on television scorebugs with little to no value in truly evaluating who’s “best” in college basketball.
