While we’ve been out of pocket, we haven’t been able to produce a blogpoll ballot in several weeks, but our fearless basketblogging cabal went on without us in the interim, and we’re now at week seven. By virtue of its scintillating second half against Georgetown last weekend, Memphis proved worthy of earning the #1 spot in this week’s poll – the third #1 team of the season (UCLA and UNC were the others).

Quick thoughts. Pitt made the biggest leap of the week (from #15 to #8), thanks to Levance Fields’ game-winning deep three against the Dookies last week. Funny how one shot can make that much of a difference. By the same token, Duke fell from #5 to #10 as a consequence of that dagger. Duke is better than we thought, but Pitt exposed their relative weakness inside – they seemed to corral just about every rebound available down the stretch. Dejuan Blair (20 rebs) in particular damn near outrebounded the Devils by himself. Clemson also made a big drop by virtue of its loss to Ole Miss last week, who effectively took its spot higher up in the rankings. We didn’t submit a ballot this week, but had we done so, Clemson still wouldn’t be ranked. We refuse to rank those poseurs until they show us once and for all they won’t tank come ACC season. And look at Bobby Thuggins at #24 – he just gets it done (in the regular season) wherever he slithers, doesn’t he?

Uncertainty. Things have pretty much begun to settle in amongst the bloggers, as the top seven are largely the same on most ballots. Everyone has Memphis or UNC in the top two, followed by Kansas (every ballot had KU #3). For some reason #14 Texas A&M is showing a large amount of variance in its placement in the poll, ranking as high as sixth in one ballot to unranked in another. Weird. As usual, and we’re partially responsible for this, #23 Clemson is also showing wide variance in its poll position, ranking as high as eleventh to also being unranked.

Conference Call.

• Big East – 5
• ACC – 4
• Big 12, Pac-10, SEC – 3 each
• A10, Big 10 – 2 each
• CUSA, Horizon, Mtn West – 1 each

Props to the A10 for stepping up and showing some game this year thus far. Dayton (@ Louisville) and URI (@ Syracuse) both have marquee road wins on their resumes, and UMass (also @ Syracuse) isn’t far behind either one. Throw in Xavier, and this could be the best A10 since the days of Chaney and Calipari – possibly a four-bid league if things break down the right way.

rtmsf (3998 Posts)

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 12:45 pm by rtmsf and is filed under blogpoll. Tagged: atlantic 10, blogpoll, bob huggins, clemson, dejuan blair, duke, kansas, levance fields, memphis, ole miss, pittsburgh, texas a&m, ucla, unc, west virginia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.