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. 

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.

Others Receiving Votes

ERRRRRRRRRRRRRR?

Look, I know we ain't top 25, and we shouldn't be top 25, and we shouldn't be top 25 even if we go 6-1 or something against the Magnolia Bakery portion of our schedule. 

I wouldn't say we should be.

And I know last year's team that ended up 9-4 started the season not even being an other receiving votes, and that progress is progress.

But yo! Let's be real here!  We're probably better than Arizona and NC State. And we are definitely not 100 votes worse than Illinois.

And Central Michigan? Central Michigan? Really, Central Michigan?

Wow.