Others Receiving.... a single vote.

So the other day I had a diatribe about how silly it was that we were ranked so low in the AP poll. 

Well, guess what folks - it gets worse!

There's a site called pollspeak.com that allows you to track all the ballots in all the AP polls. You can see who voted for who, and you can sort by either team or voter.

Anyway, NU had five votes in the AP poll, which led me to assume that somewhere in the range of 3-5 people placed us on their poll in the 23-25 spots or so. A conspiracy theory, of sorts.

However, pollspeak allows us to see that our ranking isn't based on some cabal of multiple people thinking NU is a good team: we've got ourselves a lone gunman.

Kevin Gorman, who, some research shows, is the recruiting columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, is the one voter out of the 60 in the AP poll who thought it would be a good idea to put us in the top 25. And he put us 21st. Which is crazy. Because, I mean, really? Of course we're not the 21st best team in the country.

However, Gorman has a little bit of an iffy ballot. First off, he's one of the two human beings in the poll who thinks Florida isn't the #1 team in the country, which, quite frankly, is bonkers. He also has Tennessee ranked 16th, which is seven spots higher than anybody else. His ballot is ranked as the third most extreme in the poll, and in a sort of meta-poll on the site, asking whether Gorman's ballot was good or bad, only 27 responders thought it was good, with a whopping 113 saying it was bad. 

So basically, the conventional wisdom is that we're not very good. 59 of 60 voters think that, and the 60th guy has some issues. Which basically leaves just us NU fans on the Wildcat bandwagon. Do well this year... maybe next year we'll get, like, actual votes in these polls that people can take seriously.