Hoos in the polls

Recently, a UVA chat group I’m in used a tweet from other message boarder Seattle Hoo to kick off a brief discussion of how Virginia’s treated in the rankings. The tweet:

“Does it feel like UVA pays more for losses and gains less from wins with ranksters and pollsters than other perennial top teams?”

I’ve often felt that way but usually chalked it up to my Wahoo bias. And then Villanova and Houston lost this week to an 11-7 unranked St. John’s and an 8-6 unranked East Carolina respectively. Nova dropped from 3rd to 5th in the polls, Houston from 5th to 8th. When UVA lost to then #20 Va Tech, the good guys dropped from 8th to 14th. WTF.

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I was thinking about this earlier today, but not in relation to other top teams. I was specifically thinking about VT. As you pointed out, when we lost to them (a top-20 team in their place), we dropped six spots from 8 to 14. Then they lost by double digits to an unranked Pitt and needed a miracle to avoid a second loss on the week to a severely undermanned Miami team and they dropped from 16 all the way to (drumroll, please . . .) 18. How does that make any sense? I’ve pretty much decided to just ignore the polls.

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Had the same discussion in a group I’m on based on the polls after the VT game. It’s a perception thing I think.

Also depends who loses behind you that week. Iowa, Texas, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Tennessee all also lost last week.

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I used to get upset about stuff like polls and rankings. I remember tweeting at some writer who had UVa ranked 6th when they should have been third. I used to get upset by the incredibly incompetent Jerry Palm seeding them to low in every bracketology. These guys watch a small portion of the games that are on and make decisions based on box scores, SportsCenter highlights and in UVA’s case a reputation that in most ways is outdated. The only game these guys watched was probably the Gonzaga one. But let’s be honest in the fact that UVa hasn’t proven anything yet other than TB’s teams are better than anyone else at winning the games that they should win. These next 4 games are huge. Scary GT on the road. Another road game against the other top quality team in the ACC in FSU. And even though they are down wins over UNC and at Duke will mean more nationally than winning at Clemson and beating Pitt or Syracuse at home. We have a team built different than any other TB and we don’t even know what we have yet but I think we will 2 weeks from now. So I am not really worried about the background noise and am excited about what these guys can do over the next few games.

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Agree with some sentiments above. I don’t really care about rankings unless it’s egregious, but does seem worth noting we don’t have any great or even very good wins on our resume. We got up pretty high in the polls due to a winning streak against the bottom tier of the ACC but then in the first game we played against the top tier of the ACC, we folded and lost by double digits. Teams like Villanova (at Texas) and Houston (v. Texas Tech) have better wins that voters can fall back on when saying “well are they good and just dropped this game or are they not so good?”. We don’t, so honestly makes sense to me we’d be punished more. We haven’t yet proven we can beat a really good team.

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Yeah, I get that, but right now I think UVA has a serious weakness in the “who have you beaten” category that makes us easier to drop when things go awry. Sure, VT lost to Pitt, but they’ve got wins over Nova, UVA, Duke (before people realized that wasn’t a big deal this year), and Clemson (before they’d dropped out of the rankings).

Sure, their Clemson win was watered down just like ours was (admittedly was close at home instead of a blow-out on the road, so ours was much better), but that’s our best win while they’ve got 2 that are clearly better (us and Nova) and another that’s arguably as good (Duke). Overall schedule difficulties have been very comparable, but voters give teams a LOT more credit for beating top 25 teams than beating top 50 teams, and it isn’t balanced out by the top 25-beating team playing more sub-300 opponents during OOC.

Until UVA gets some ranked wins, opportunities for which are a little sparse (FSU and maybe Louisville), UVA is going to get punished hard for any losses.

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Good wins are great. But what about bad losses? Tech has one really bad loss (Penn State at home) and 2 that are at least mildly unsightly (double digit road losses to Syracuse and Pitt). Combine that with their thoroughly underwhelming showings in the objective rankings (35 KenPom and 45 Torvik), and it seems like last week should have sent a pretty strong signal to AP voters that it was time for them to take a sizable tumble.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not whining about the pollsters treating us unfairly relative to Tech. There is no such thing as fairness in a media poll. All the participants are giving their honest assessment of the teams’ relative merits. Tech certainly looked plenty good when they were laying the wood to us in the second half a few weeks ago and they’re undoubtedly a good story. It just seems like there is a little bit of a halo effect working in their favor with AP voters at the moment.

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Yes and no. I certainly agree that the analytical rankings of VT are underwhelming, but KenPom actually has Penn State higher ranked than VT (7-8, but ranked #30. That’s what having the #1 national strength of schedule will get you. Yeah, they had a 5 game losing streak, but all 5 teams were top 25 and 4 of them were on the road. Going 1-4 over that stretch would have counted as a victory) plus it was on the road. So, it wasn’t a good loss because of the big margin but it wasn’t really a terrible loss. VT’s losses are kinda all like that. None of them are “good losses” per se (though Louisville is probably close) but none are awful either.

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Penn St beat VT in Blacksburg.

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Oh, yeah. You’re right.