Luke DeCock’s AP Top 25 basketball poll ballot: Week 20
The Helms Foundation doesn’t exist anymore. The amateur athletic club became retroactively famous when North Carolina apparently decided it needed a fourth national title after Duke won its third in 2001 and promoted an obscure banner acknowledging the equally obscure 1924 Helms Foundation title into a place of prominence alongside Lennie Rosenbluth’s 1957 NCAA banner in the Smith Center rafters. It’s still up there next to the six NCAA titles, even if UNC no longer needs it to stay ahead of Duke.
The Helms Foundation was best known for going back, in 1943, and awarding national titles for the years before the NCAA held a tournament, but it was basically just one guy. If it was still kicking around — it disbanded in 2007 after many years of irrelevance — it would certainly be getting a call from Lawrence, Kan., this week. Kansas already has two Helms Foundation banners hanging in Allen Fieldhouse, labeled exactly the same as the three won on the court, so the Jayhawks certainly aren’t going to stop now.
Kansas is going to finish No. 1 in this final Associated Press poll, which gives it as much right as anyone to claim a national championship in a season unexpectedly devoid of a tournament. While Butler also claims the 1924 title, no one can really argue with Kansas this year.
Even if this final vote is a farce.
I made my feelings known to the AP last week that we shouldn’t be voting this week. It isn’t fair that Gonzaga had two chances to lose while Kansas, the presumptive No. 1, had none. The Zags were out there risking it all on the court — nearly losing to a very tricky San Francisco team — while Kansas, it turns out, was playing with house money the whole time.
The right thing to do would have been to suspend voting, accept last week’s poll, the last from a full, uninterrupted week of basketball, as the final poll and declare the season complete. It wouldn’t have changed anything at the top — Kansas is going to claim the title anyway — but it would have been more equitable to teams like BYU and St. Mary’s that played and lost when, say, none of the top seeds in Power 5 conferences even played once. A team like San Diego State, which lost last week, misses out on a chance to move up by default.
In a week when every team save one in every conference is going to lose, period, end of story, not playing becomes a huge advantage. That may not matter most years when the final poll is an exercise in irrelevance — superseded immediately by the NCAA tournament — but it does this year.
I considered turning in an unchanged ballot in protest, but in the end decided if there are more data points to consider, they should be considered. If nothing else, it’s good for East Tennessee State and gives the Buccaneers a chance to make it into the poll at large. (They’ve been on my ballot for weeks now.)
I wrote this last week, in a fit of naivete:
Only one poll left after this one, and this is really the last one that isn’t inevitably influenced by what happens Sunday night. The last one that’s a true measure of voters’ opinions, without the gravitational pull of NCAA seedings.
It should have been the last one anyway. We should have sent in our all-America teams and, like the rest of college basketball, cut things abruptly short.
I have been considering for a while whether this is my final year as a voter, whether the constant abuse is worth the time and effort expended in what is essentially a service to the college-basketball community. There’s a sense of obligation, too; the fewer educated voters willing to take on this task, the worse the results are going to be. But if things are going to be done this haphazardly, maybe it’s a sign that my tenure has come to an end. I guess I have plenty of time to mull.
In the end, there’s no harm done. Kansas is clearly No. 1, and the Jayhawks were clearly going to hang a banner no matter whether we voted this week or not. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things, and this is definitely the wrong way to go about the voting.
THIS SEASON’S BALLOTS
Week 1 (Preseason) Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 Week 7 Week 8 Week 9 Week 10 Week 11 Week 12 Week 13 Week 14 Week 15 Week 16 Week 17 Week 18 Week 19
THIS WEEK’S TOP 25 BASKETBALL BALLOT
1. Kansas (Last week: 1)
2. Gonzaga (2)
3. Dayton (3)
4. San Diego State (4)
5. Duke (5)
6. Baylor (6)
7. Florida State (7)
8. Creighton (8)
9. Michigan State (9)
10. Maryland (10)
11. Villanova (11)
12. Louisville (13)
13. West Virginia (14)
14. Wisconsin (15)
15. BYU (12)
16. Kentucky (16)
17. Oregon (17)
18. East Tennessee State (18)
19. Ohio State (19)
20. Seton Hall (20)
21. Michigan (21)
22. Iowa (22)
23. Virginia (23)
24. Houston (24)
25. Illinois (25)
OUT None
This story was originally published March 18, 2020 at 7:00 AM.
