Normally, we'd look at the AP Basketball Poll, see Syracuse is ranked No. 9 and be done with it. But this season has been such a strange one and the Orange are such a weird kind of 4-0 that we need to dig deeper to find out what everyone is thinking. And what everyone is thinking is...something different.
How different? Syracuse has so divided AP voters that there's a guy who thinks Syracuse is the No. 4 team in the country and there's three guys who think they're not even worthy of a ranking at all.
God bless Jeffrey Martin for his placement of the Orange at No. 4 but that tells me more about how much Jeff has actually watched SU play than about how good he really thinks they are.
The folks who probably do actually watch the Orange and have a fair assessment of how good they are? Well they don't think quite as highly of them. Last year's first believer, Dick Weiss, has the Orange all the way down at No. 18. Cuse grad Mike Rothstein puts SU in at No. 19. Curmudgeon Jeff Goodman slots the Orange in at No. 21.
And then there's Dave Jones, Mark Berman and Paul Klee, who don't even include the Orange in their Top 25.
Given the season so far, while I don't think the Orange have played so poorly they need to drop out of the rankings altogether, I don't blame any of those folks for dropping them down so far.
That said, most folks still have SU in the 8-9 range, which either means they're just keeping them in place until they lose or they haven't really been paying attention.
The Orange are also No. 10 in the Coaches Poll.