Sorry for the sensationalist headline, but as Fox likes to quote Jim Healy, "Who Goofed?"
In this case, the answer is Doh!n.
There's a reason why we don't take the basketball polls seriously around here, and unfortunately, one of the biggest reasons sits right in our backyard: Doh!n is an AP voter.
On his ballot, Kansas remains in place at #2 despite their loss, Michigan State doesn't budge despite their loss to Penn State. Florida drops out after losing to Arkansas for most people, but not for Doh!n, sitting them comfortably at #21. It's as if he didn't watch any basketball this week at all. To further prove that point, he put SUC at #20. Unranked SUC leapfrogs five teams from being out of his ranking altogether to land at 20 because of their impressive week: Losing to an unranked team at home which then proceeds to get the daylights beaten out of them by the Bruins.
To put this further in perspective, SUC had 21 overall "votes" in the AP poll out of 72 writers. Doh!n is responsible for 6 of them all by himself. 15 "votes" remaining spread across 71 writers makes Doh!n the ultimate statistical outlier: a WTF vote of gargantuan proportions. How Doh!n justifies giving them 6 votes when his colleagues gave them 0.21 votes per writer is beyond me. How about the fact that Arizona, WSU, and SUC are all tied in the conference, yet Arizona is unranked despite beating the trOJans head to head at home. WSU is ranked below SUC despite accomplishing the same feat. There is no consistency. If SUC is a #20, then Arizona and WSU should be higher based on their records and head to head matchups.
What is sad here is that Doh!n is quite good when he does his job properly. I hate to see his potential marred by his utter incompetence when he ventures outside of his little box where he reports beyond the facts.
After all, he gives us the sobering news that Luc will miss the Washington trip. And that Eric Scott is definitely out and we are looking at Brent Brennan from SJSU to fill our WR coach position.
It has been proven again and again that Doh!n is a failure when he ventures outside of the facts. His editorializing on all subjects starting from his backing of KD to this absolute farce of a poll he put out is growing tiresome, and we're not the only ones that feel that way. From commenter "bruinsRback" on Doh!n's own blog:
For the longest time, he harped on keeping Dorrell as our football coach, knowing full-well that Dorrell-ball would continue to keep us right where he views us as, a mid-tier pac-10 team with no chance of competing for a pac-10 championship and a BCS berth on a yearly basis. Thank God Utah, ND, etc. made it impossible to keep him and bring in the best coaching staff in the country to revive our football program. Yes Brian, it is the top coaching staff in the country regardless of your futile arguments otherwise.
For Brian to rank us as the #5 bball team in the country after our amazing last four games in which even East-coast Bias Jay Bilas acknowledged that UCLA is the BEST team in the country, reveals his utter and complete bias against seeing the UCLA program on top of any national rankings.
We lose by 2 to an outstanding Texas team on a last-second miss by Luc and he drops us out of the top 5, while keeping Kansas #2 after losing to the first real team they've played all year?
Memphis is so dominant? Have you actually seen the list of teams that comprise C-USA??? USC would be a perennial #1 seed coming out of that conference!
And Duke? Who on earth hav they played so far? UNC? After 2 OT wins in the past 2 weeks, and of course they stay above us.
I agree with many other posters who acknowledge that while Brian does a great job providing inside recruiting info--although this is the job that he is paid to do (remember he was so confident that more than 1/2 of Dorrell's recruits would flee if he was fired and look what's happened to our class as we continue to ADD players to this outstanding class), we need a local hometown paper who actually has a writer that doesn't have such a clear bias against our home-town college team.
I'm pretty confident that the local Kansas/Memphis/Duke beat reporters all have their teams in the top 4, so why not ours? Don't tell me that it's to Brian's credit that he is so 'objective' and 'unbiased' in his rankings. His justifications make no sense whatsoever.
Let's get Jill to take over Brian's role since she covers the Bruins with clear objectivity and no antagonistic bias towards the program. Brian, sorry if along the way some Bruins rubbed you in the wrong way leading to your antagonistic attitude to all-things Bruin, but it's time you head back east to cover your beloved Rutgers programs. Maybe you can rank them in your top-10 pre-season football poll when you get back.
Ouch Brian. Very Ouch.