The Low Major Poll, Week 2
A pretty uneventful week for college basketball's power brokers leaves our poll fairly stagnant, but not all is calm
Welcome back to The Low Major Poll: our weekly look at the top 25 teams in college basketball as determined by four of our writers and one of our good friends.
Our voters:
At center, 7’3” from Pepperdine, the poster with the most-er: David Peterson! (@depeterson61)
At guard, 6’0” from Minnesota, the five-star floor general: Eli Powell! (@wellitseli)
The other guard, 6’2” from Minnesota State, a D1 talent from a D2 school: maddy! (@maddybutsports)
At forward, 6’8” from High Point, nobody knows what his name means but it’s provocative: Ret! (hides his socials)
And the other forward, 6’6” from Tennessee, joining us on a weekly basis from : ! (@PrestonPack)
Our Week 2 poll is as follows.
Unless specified otherwise, all rankings are per KenPom.com on the morning of November 14.
Eli: Seems we’re misaligned with consensus again. The internet loves Houston, while the AP kept North Carolina at #1.
Ret: I love the variety near the bottom.
Eli: Me too! Always the best part of the November polls. Preston got Wisconsin ranked all by themself.
Ret: David keeping Tennessee has to be a mistake knowing him.
Eli: For how reactionary the rest of his ballot is (unranked Creighton!), Tennessee being all the way up at #13 is a bit surprising, yeah. He also gave Furman their only four points, while our resident SoCon aficionado gave them zero!
Ret: Trouble brewing in the SoCon Lowdown sphere??? Many are asking!
Preston: I will amend this immediately next week when I institute the SoCon Team of the Week! Unless I like somebody more than Furman this week. Who’s to say?
Eli: Ret, why Kansas? I get being a little lower on Gonzaga but what about specifically Kansas stood out to you?
Ret: I just think they’re neat!
Eli: …
Ret: I am a big hater of polls in the first couple weeks for a reason. If you wanted to rank anyone who’s currently 2-0 at #1, I literally won’t fight you (unless it’s Michigan because fuck ‘em).
Eli: Winthrop it is. Ahhh wait, they lost?
Ret: (evil laughter)
Eli: Man, our 2-0 Big South teams are High Point and UNC Asheville, and each of them have played a non-D1 team. What a world.
Preston: #1 Samford you say?1
Ret: Do it! I do not care. We don’t have actual results to discount it!
Eli: We do evidently have results enough to unrank TCU. I had them at #9 in the preseason but then they looked really dicey at home against #355 Arkansas-Pine Bluff and #357 Lamar. They won both but it looks like most of us are out on them right now, myself included. I ranked multiple B1G teams over them; that's how you know it's bad.
Preston: I think that’s a reasonable approach with teams like TCU especially. Teams with more uncertainty should be able to move up and down more quickly, but you don’t often see that in polls.
Ret: I gave them a stay of execution in my poll, but they gotta not suck this week.
Eli: They have #352 Northwestern State and #262 ULM this week, also both at home.
Preston: My thinking is, if TCU played two teams in even the top 200 last week, they’re probably 0-2 or at best 1-1.
Eli: Let’s talk about a similarly uncertain team who did just that: Villanova. Two Big Five games to open the season. Beat #187 LaSalle by 13 at home and then dropped a game at #97 Temple in maybe the pettiest ending to any sporting event I’ve ever seen. It’s not a good loss and none of us ranked Villanova as a result.
Ret: As our Temple friend Claire would say: “so based”. Temple might choose to ruin Nova’s résumé by losing intentionally. Philly sports are truly petty, it’s great.
Eli: They even lost to #261 Wagner in the previous game to make themselves look as bad as possible. You couldn’t script it any pettier.
Ret: So based.
Eli: All in all, not much of substance in the top 25 at large this past week. It was an entertaining week, but it was an entertaining week of buy games in which most (but certainly not all) of the best teams won.
Ret: (laughs at Oklahoma)
Eli: The most substantial game of the week probably shouldn’t even count for anything because it was played on a slippery life raft in the ocean with the wind and sun screwing up every possession. But Preston did put Michigan State at #13 out of that ordeal, almost making them the second team we had ranked despite only appearing on their ballot.
Preston: My reasoning there is largely based on that same logic of uncertainty, but also on the fact that Gonzaga is a much more physical team and you could argue the weather conditions should have affected them less. Of course, we’ll get a much better read on Michigan State in the next couple weeks, so this won’t be the information we’re relying on for long, thankfully.
David: Ugh, I thought I pulled Tennessee out. Ffs. Anyways! Hello folks, I’m back from the vet.
Eli: Well let’s talk about Tennessee. Their loss to #62 Colorado on a semi-home court in Nashville was pretty stunning, especially after Colorado had just lost at #298 Grambling State, but at least two of us still have them ranked on purpose.
David: I meant to have them at 20.
Ret: Oh, so I’m based and David isn’t. Neat!
Eli: This is a weird team so far. They can play some of the best defense in D1, as shown in their game against #340 Tennessee Tech (and on a regular basis year-over-year in the Rick Barnes era), but their offense is usually a lot more of the physical, bully ball variety. This year, they’re shooting a frankly absurd amount of threes: 63.3% of their field goal attempts through two games have come from beyond the arc (first in the country). They’re only making 29.6% of them, so it’s unclear whether they actually have the personnel to run such an offense very efficiently.2 Personally, with how much (here’s that word again) uncertainty exists near the bottom of the poll, I just didn’t think in my heart of hearts that so many teams were definitively better than them, even with the loss, but I can easily see how one would.
Thanks again to Preston Pack for joining us. If you like reading our stuff, you’ll love their newsletter , especially The SoCon Lowdown: their weekly recap series on Southern Conference basketball. Give 'em a sub!
See you next week!
Editor’s note: Samford has played three non-D1 teams and defeated all three.
All of these stats per KenPom on the morning of November 14
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