Below is the newest rankings from the blogpoll including 20 different basketball writers from across the web. The votes were cast following Big Monday’s games, so the losses by Tennessee and Texas A&M over the last two nights are not factored into the rankings. The column furthest to the right is my own personal ballot, and any ranking of “26” indicates that I did not rank that particular team in the Top 25. The full Excel document with everyone’s votes can be found here.

This week’s blogpoll consisted of votes from NCAA Hoops Today, March to Madness, SEC Hoops: The Good. The Bad. The Dirty., March Madness All Season, A Sea of Blue, Storming the Floor, Vegas Watch, WSU Hoops, Super, Scintillating, and Sarcastic, George Mason Basketball, College Hoops Journal, Gopher Nation, Bryce’s Brackets and Observations, Making the Dance, and yours truly. Five bloggers absented from this week’s vote.

With 15 of last week’s Top 25 losing, there was a lot of variance in the different rankings. In retrospect, I have no idea why I left Rhode Island in the poll, much less at 20th, but I am going to blame it on having to vote right after returning home from the 20-hour trip to Stillwater.

I had Pittsburgh significantly lower than other teams as a result of their loss to a Cincinnati team that has been awful all season long. The ‘Cats have come back to record wins over Syracuse, Villanova, and Pitt in conference, but they still have pretty lopsided losses to St. John’s and Notre Dame in the Big East. Perhaps time will prove Cincy to be a stronger team than I thought and validate the Panthers for this loss, but for this week I felt they were being overvalued.

Drake was ranked much lower in the cumulative poll than where I had them, but with so many losses in front of them that week, I slid them up the board to 12th. Clearly Drake is not actually the 12th best team in the country, but at this snapshot in time I feel it’s defensible that they are one of the 15 teams playing the best basketball. If you’ve got Full Court, you can be the judge when they air the Bulldogs hosting Northern Iowa on Saturday.

Thoughts, comments? Feel free to chime in here, and definitely pile on for the Rhode Island thing.

We’re alive and back home, having driven through a pea soup of a fog from about Oklahoma City to Austin. But sleep deprivation and white knuckles are a very cheap price to see the Horns finally pull out the win in Stillwater after witnessing three prior losses there. Game wrap will be coming closer to midnight tonight, but in the meantime here’s your Fast Break around college hoops…

New rankings came out yesterday, with Texas climbing to 12th in both polls. Baylor finally crawled into the AP poll at 25th, their first ranking since the late 1960’s. Unfortunately the coaches stiffed them with only 11 points, good enough for the equivalent of 32nd. K-State is also putting pressure on the Top 25 after its manhandling of A&M on Saturday, landing in the “others receiving votes” category of both rankings. Kansas sits in 2nd in both rankings, while the Aggies slipped to 16th in the ESPN/USA Today poll and 18th in the AP after two blowout losses to unranked opponents.

Joe Lunardi’s newest Bracketology moves Texas up the S-curve to a 3-seed, although at this point the city assignments are relatively meaningless. He’s got the Big 12 with 5 teams at the moment, and Oklahoma is sitting in the first group of eight teams that missed the cut. (NIT, holla!) Kansas is obviously still holding tight to a 1-seed, while A&M has dropped to an 8, Baylor holds a 6, and K-State is the 7-seed in UNC’s bracket.

This week’s blogpoll will be released tonight, so rather than post my own vote today and then the whole thing tomorrow, we’ll throw it all up here at once and open up the discussion. Needless to say, it was a very difficult week with 15 of last week’s 25 ranked teams losing at least once, so I’m sure there will be some head-scratching going on when all is said and done.

It’s a new week, which means new polls debut this afternoon. And after the rash of upsets this past week, there is sure to be a ton of movement through the rankings. Twelve of the ESPN/USA Today Top 25 lost, including the unlucky folks at Texas A&M, Marquette, and Miami who all lost both of their games this week. A lot of the carnage happened just in front of the Longhorns, who will probably move up six slots to #13 this week. Of course, if voters decide to punish Vandy for their loss (despite the fact it came to the hottest one-loss team in the country) that could edge the Horns up even as far as 12th in this week’s ranking.

Bad news this weekend for K-State senior David Hoskins. The AP reports that his injury will now force him to miss the whole season, although he might apply for another year of eligibility according to Coach Frank Martin. I hope that Hoskins goes forward with the medical redshirt and gets his fifth year, but I also hope that Michael Beast-ly and Bill Walker are long gone by then, because I’m tired of losing to the ‘Cats at home.

I never linked up Luke Winn’s newest power rankings on Friday morning, so take a gander. Texas slipped out of the Top 16, although I have a feeling they’ll be crawling their way back in on Thursday. Butler finally cracked the Top 10, although they lost to Cleveland State the night that this was published. Oops.

My own blogpoll vote is due tonight, and the crazy weekend has certainly muddied the picture. I’m sticking with Kansas at #1 with Memphis a close second, and at the moment I like the red-hot Volunteers in third followed by Carolina, Duke, and UCLA. I’ve got fourteen hours in a car today to think about it all, and of course the Big Monday contests could make things even more confusing if Georgetown or Texas goes down. I’ll be posting my full ballot tomorrow and will try to justify any head-scratching selections, so be sure to come back and rip me to shreds if I Prothro the vote.

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?

Sorry for the lack of the regular daily posts on Monday, but instead of recovering from the 27 hours of traveling over the weekend, I instead worked ten more and then came home to immediately pass out. Things should be back on track the rest of the week, although Horns in the League will not return until tomorrow.

Monday of course means new polls, and Texas predictably fell in both of them. The Horns slipped to 19th in both the ESPN/USA Today and AP rankings. Besides the Horns, the only other three-loss squads to crack the polls are Xavier (20th in both), Villanova (21st/25th), and Clemson (23rd/24th). The Big 12 still has the same three teams in both polls, although OU, Baylor, Mizzou, and K-State all grabbed a few votes from the coaches.

There was also a new Bracketology from Joe Lunardi, who slid the Horns to a 4-seed playing in Denver for the first two rounds. As far as I’m concerned, that sounds great. It might be selfish, but I’d rather not deal with the nutjob Razorback fans if Texas were to get the “home pod” in Little Rock. The B-12 is the second-most represented conference, with the Jayhawks (1-seed), Aggies (2), Wildcats (8), Sooners (9), and Bears (10) joining the Horns in the mix.

Caught up on some weekend TV thanks to the DVR and absolutely loved Rick Barnes’ appearance on Friday Night Lights. Coach played a recruiter from the fictional Texas Methodist University, which uses the TSU football stadium on the show but has a superimposed Austin skyline behind it. Barnes got the hotshot “Smash” Williams to give a verbal commitment to TMU, but I’ve got to hope his real recruiting calls are a little less wooden. If you missed it, you can check out full episodes at NBC.com. Rick’s in Episode 211, and he appears near the end.

I’ve just joined a pretty big blogpoll hosted by the good folks at March to Madness. There are currently 18 voters and the newest poll will be released tomorrow, covering games through last night’s Big Monday. I’ll show my selections tomorrow along with commentary and invite you readers to chime in with your own thoughts.