Inside the AP Poll: Why it makes no sense that Texas remains ranked

Each week, I join 65 other AP voters and submit my Top 25. The process has gotten easier as the season has gone on because we have so many more results and so much more information to base that ballot on. I try not to overreact to individual results as much as possible — anyone who watches college football knows it is incredibly easy to do just that — and I try to re-evaluate every few weeks to make sure I’m giving teams the proper amount of credit for wins and losses based on the new knowledge we have of their past opponents.

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I am not convinced that my fellow voters are doing that with Texas. The Longhorns are 6-2, and they play in the SEC. That appears to be all that is required to keep them in the Top 25. Every SEC team with two or fewer losses is ranked. It took LSU picking up its third loss in blowout fashion at home for the Tigers to finally fall out of the poll — even though it’s been obvious for weeks that the LSU offense has all sorts of problems, starting with its inability to run the ball and a star quarterback who has regressed.

Instead of basing a decision on both the eye test and all of the metrics that backed up what we were seeing weekly from Garrett Nussmeier and Co., my fellow voters kept giving the Tigers credit they didn’t deserve. They waited for that third loss, then they could defend the decision not to rank LSU. Some of us reached that point weeks earlier.

The exact same dynamic is happening with Texas. Most voters are defaulting to keeping the Longhorns in their Top 25s as long as they win their games, even if they’re ugly. It doesn’t matter that it took a frantic comeback and overtime for Texas to beat Mississippi State on Saturday — a result that handed the Bulldogs their 16th consecutive SEC loss. Slide ’em up two spots!
Why?

The Longhorns needed overtime to beat two of the worst teams in the SEC (Kentucky, Mississippi State). Just one of Texas’ wins this season has come over a team with a record better than .500 (Oklahoma). The Longhorns have one good loss (to No. 1 Ohio State) and one inexplicably bad loss (to Florida, a team that has since fired its head coach). What exactly gives this Texas team a reason to be ranked, outside of a few analytics that favor ‘em? The win over Oklahoma is good, but it has devalued after the Sooners’ loss to Ole Miss; Oklahoma has three games remaining against ranked teams and could fall further.

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Texas is No. 20, but Iowa is unranked by the AP poll despite two good losses (including the best effort we’ve seen from anyone against the buzzsaw that is Indiana), one dominant win over a team with a winning record and zero overtime wins over bad teams. Why is that any different than the Texas resume, except for the names on the jerseys and the conference affiliation? Statistically, Iowa is slightly better than Texas in most defensive categories and slightly worse in most offensive categories. SP+ has the two teams just four spots apart. Both teams have warts, but one team is a top-20 team and the other is fourth in “also receiving votes.”

02:10

Iowa, Bernard lead top performances of Week 9

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Nicole Auerbach explains why she was so impressed with Iowa after a dominant victory against Minnesota while Joshua Perry dives into Germie Bernard’s heroics to help Alabama come out on top vs. South Carolina.

I freely admit that it is difficult to rank 25 teams each week. After the top three or four teams, it gets hard! Everyone’s got weaknesses. Some teams have a lot of wins, but most aren’t high-quality. Others have multiple losses but they’re close and to some of the best teams in the country. It’s hard to weigh the good vs. the bad for each team. But I do hope my fellow voters pay as close attention to the bottom of the Top 25 as they do to the top. We do not need to wait for an arbitrary third loss to drop an undeserving team from the rankings. We can evaluate these teams beyond the box scores.

Stray thoughts/observations:

• Virginia is another team that has a lot of wins (three in overtime!) but, really, just one good one — over Louisville. And how good is Louisville? That’s a resume that’s propped up on something I don’t fully trust right now, either.

• The Group of 5 race is going to be fascinating now that Memphis knocked off USF. My peers rewarded the Tigers for the win with a spot in the Top 25, while I opted for Tulane and Navy (both unbeaten in American conference play). But it’s obvious that any of those four could win this conference, and then we’ll see how the American champion stacks up against the best from the Mountain West (maybe San Diego State?) and the Sun Belt (JMU?) conferences.