Thursday means new power rankings, and we’ve got ’em hot and fresh. Texas barely stayed in ESPN’s Power 16, hanging on to the 16th slot by the hair of their chinny-chinny-chin. A&M dropped out as a result of the demoralizing loss to Tech last night, while Kansas ascended to the #1 slot just ahead of Memphis. Vandy still isn’t getting any love, but if they can knock off the Vols, who are #5 in this week’s power rankings, the Commodores should jump quite a few teams.

Luke Winn still doesn’t have his rankings up, but we’ll get those linked up tomorrow morning if he does in fact publish them later this afternoon.

I mentioned earlier this week that I have been included in a college hoops blogpoll, and here are the newest rankings. These reflect the games through Monday night, so the losses by A&M, Dayton, and Xavier were not considered. Long-time readers of this site know how much I love crunching the numbers, so my votes favor the mid-majors a little stronger than others may have. Based simply on the numbers, I probably could’ve voted Texas higher than 19th, but until I see them put together another 40 minutes of good basketball, I have to treat the current Longhorns as a completely different team from the one that put together that solid resumé at the end of the year.

Kevin McCarthy over at Parsing the WAC has this interesting find, where conference officials have told Utah State students that their chants are too offensive and could result in a team technical. I might expect this from a tiny conference on the East Coast, but big-time college athletes have to be used to hearing every sort of awful thing someone could conceive of. I guarantee you that Tyler Hansbrough has heard opposing students mention every type of sexual act imaginable involving his mother, father, dog, cousin, uncle, and any other family member. But the ACC doesn’t come down on those students — or, God forbid, the Cameron Crazies — and you don’t see this knee-jerk reaction in the SEC, Big 10, or Big 12 either. There are four-year olds saying “suck,” for Pete’s sake. Do we really need conference offices drawing lines on something this benign?