The dawn of the 2021-22 NCAA Basketball season is nearly upon us, and with it, comes a flurry of preseason projections and polls that will follow teams throughout the entirety of the season. No ranking, however, is more synonymous with college basketball than the AP Top 25 Poll, which saw its preseason variation released on Monday morning.
Every AP Top 25 poll is met with some form of controversy, no matter the sport – and this season’s poll is no exception. The Associated Press is coming off a 2020-21 campaign that saw its voters rank both Duke and Kentucky – two teams that missed the NCAA Tournament – within the top 10, whereas Michigan, UCLA, and Houston were all ranked between 15th and 25th.
What AP voters did nail last season, however, was following the national trend and slotting Gonzaga and Baylor into the first two slots of the poll – which, until the national championship game, appropriately had the Bulldogs in first and the Bears in second. That trend appears to be the same case again this year, albeit, only with Gonzaga appearing in the top spot this time around, although UCLA also garnered eight first-place votes in the process.
This year’s top 25 poll is decidedly split into a few different factions – Gonzaga is over 100 points ahead of UCLA, who leads third-ranked Kansas by barely 30 points. A sizeable gap separates the Jayhawks with the assortment of teams through 4-7, before another gap keeps 8-19 in their own collection.
POLL ALERT: Gonzaga is No. 1 in the preseason AP Top 25 men's basketball poll; UCLA, Kansas, Villanova and Texas round out the top five.
— AP Top 25 (@AP_Top25) October 18, 2021
Full poll: https://t.co/ZJG5mgWrsa pic.twitter.com/c8XZq3XW1r
To put this year’s poll into perspective – and, in particular, how packed the middle is: this is the first AP Top 25 Poll since 2017-18 to have less than 10 teams earn 1,000 points – and, with that count at seven, also features the least amount in that stretch. In addition, there are a host of new teams to the AP Top 25 poll; since 2020-21’s final poll on March 15th, 11 new teams have joined the rankings, including a trio of top 10 teams in UCLA, Duke, and Kentucky.
Again, every ranking is chockful of controversy – and this year’s preseason projections were not fortunate enough to avoid such a hassle. There were and are bound to be multiple fanbases upset with the placements, rankings, and – in some cases – omissions – of their respective teams, and it is reasonable for most of those opinions to have a solid foundation. The following are some of the most egregious and notable issues with the AP Top 25 poll.