this must be some type of sick joke.

As noted, I like me some AP polls. It's a nice checkup on NU's perception around teh college football world, which is hard to get from inside our big "hey, Northwestern is good!" biodome shielding us from the outside world. 

So, I checked the updated polls today, and after my big freakin' song and dance on sunday... we're not even receiving votes anymore. None. 

I know this isn't something to be upset about, because not a single person in the world gives about the bottom of the AP poll, but, I've assembled a timeline of recent events.

A few weeks ago: NU had five AP votes.

Saturday: NU beats Towson 47-14. 

Today: NU has no AP votes. 

To help interpret that timeline, here is a timeline of of Northwestern-related things Kevin Gorman, a high school football reporter from Pittsburgh who gave NU all five of their votes in the last poll, has done, or at least things I'd imagine he's done.

A few weeks ago: Gorman fills out his ballot. He remembers NU did well last year, and puts us 21st.

A day after that: Gorman looks at everybody else's ballot, and realizes that not a single other human being in the universe thinks we're a top 25 team. Rather than stand by his guns, he makes up his mind to remove NU from his next ballot regardless of how they perform, in order to avoid being laughed at by some nerdy sports writers. 

Saturday: NU beats Towson 47-14.

Yesterday: Gorman fills out his next ballot, in which he removes NU, but leaves Texas and Tennessee in the highest position of any reporter filling out a ballot.

Right now: A bored NU blogger contemplates using the word "spineless" in this post, then realizes he really, really hopes nobody is writing posts about how stupid his ballots are in ten years when he is a journalist of some sort. 

Overall, I can't fault Gorman for his actions: he's just a guy who's filling out some stupid ballot, and he doesn't deserve to be criticized for it over the internet. He made a mistake by ranking NU as highly as he did. If I were him, I wouldn't have done that, but I would've stuck by my cojones and left NU as high in the next poll. But like I said earlier, the AP poll is a nice look into the way NU is perceived, and I guarantee you, there's not many other schools that could pull off a magic trick like having votes one week, winning convincingly, and then making them disappear.