John Wilner must hate the color orange.
You'll see why if you keep reading the Poll Attacks.
AP poll: Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury News took a beating from Syracuse fans a few weeks ago after I pointed out how he didn't have the Orange ranked even though they were, at the time, 11-1 with wins over Florida, Kansas and Memphis. Ultimately, John declared it a typo, called himself "idiotic" and promised to buy ribs when he was back in town, and I think everybody was OK with it because it was admirable to acknowledge the mistake.
But now John has another problem: Clemson.
He is the only AP voter who doesn't have the Tigers on his ballot, and there's really no explanation for that unless it involves another typo. Clemson is 14-0 with a win over the Illinois team that beat Purdue (which is ranked 11th on John's ballot), a win over the Temple team that beat Tennessee (which is ranked 13th on John's ballot), and wins at Miami and South Carolina.
So by any measuring stick, Clemson has a nice resume.
That's why the Tigers are 10th in the Top 25 (and one), 11th in the Coaches poll and 12th in the AP poll.
So, Clemson fans, I advise you to email John and see why he's not ranking your team.
Perhaps you'll get some ribs out of the deal.
And now it's time for our weekly George Geise update: I must admit, I look forward to George's ballot as much as I look forward to anything, and I'll have you know that he didn't let me down, because the guy's curious pattern of bouncing Xavier all over the place continued. To recap: George did not rank the Musketeers when they started 5-0 with wins over Missouri and Memphis. So I called him on it, and he shot Xavier all the way up to 16th after a victory over Miami (Ohio). From there, the Musketeers went on to lose two of their next six, but George didn't care because he moved them up from 16th to 12th in that time span, which led to me Poll Attacking him last week. So then Xavier won two games over the past seven days, and do you want to guess how George ranked Sean Mller's team this week?
Answer: Not at all.
He dropped the Musketeers from 12th to completely off his ballot after two wins.
Seriously.
Meantime, Gonzaga lost to Utah, but George still has the four-loss Zags ranked 16th.
Can't wait till next week.
Coaches poll: There are about 40 teams that could reasonably make a case to be ranked in the Top 25, so I'm not going to call people stupid for ranking LSU or Stanford or Utah State, because though I don't agree I recognize it's pretty subjective outside the top 15. The only totally dumb vote I see is where some coach put Washington at No. 25 on his ballot, because Washington has three losses (including one to Portland) and no good wins, and I'm not sure how that translates into a Top 25 ranking.
But whatever.
I don't really care.
Because I want to instead focus on Georgetown and how the Hoyas dropped from eighth to 10th after beating UConn and losing to Pittsburgh. Does that make any sense? In last week's Coaches poll, UConn was ranked second, Pitt was third and Georgetown was eighth. So if the No. 8 team manages to split games with the No. 2 team and No. 3 team, how does that make them worse than No. 8? Seems to me that suggests the Hoyas are better than we thought a week ago, which is why I moved John Thompson III's team up from ninth to fifth in the Top 25 (and one).
