We’re back in action, and actually contributing to the blogpoll again!

Note: keep in mind that the blogpoll did not take into account games from Tues. and Wed. nights (i.e., Ole Miss’s loss to Tennessee, or Clemson’s loss to Charlotte).

Justifying Our Ballot. We haven’t voted for a while, but the last time we did, we were voting UCLA #1. We still think they’re the team to beat in March, but they have sice lost to Texas, so we dropped them down a tad. Most of our colleagues are voting Memphis to the top spot, but after Carolina’s scintillating comeback win against Clemson on Sunday night, we’re convinced the Heels deserve the pinnacle for now. It’s notable that every pollster believes that Memphis or UNC is the best team in America, but nobody is voting for Kansas (also undefeated and looking great) at that spot. As for the rest of the poll, we’re pretty closely aligned with the rest of the bloggers with the exceptions of Vanderbilt (we think they’re much better than people are giving them credit for), Clemson (you’ve heard our tirades on the Tigers, but they’ll be outie next week anyway), Oklahoma (not sure why they’re rising faster than, say, Ohio St.), and West Virginia (not sold on them quite yet). We had Stanford (#21), Arizona (#23) and Notre Dame (#24) on our ballot instead.

The Curious Case of Vanderbilt. We understand Marquette, Pitt and Villanova all dropping from last week (hint: they all lost). But we wanted to figure out how an undefeated team actually fell a spot, as Vandy did (from #16 to #17) this week. As far as we can tell, APAIS.net is responsible for this strange occurrence. Slackers like us, they didn’t provide a ballot last week, but this week they ranked the ‘Dores #22, which aggregated their average total a little lower than last week. So send all your hate mail to those guys, Vandy fans. :-)

Variance. As we alluded to earlier this week in our post about the lack of parity this year, the top nine teams are tightly woven into their respective positions. Among the Top 10, only Georgetown creates some dissonance (ranked from #4 to, shockingly, STF has them unranked). Dayton and Clemson (as usual) are the other two teams that have widely variable positions this week.

Conference Call.

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