Preliminary BasketBlogpoll

As promised, welcome to our preliminary basketblogpoll ballot.

A couple of ground rules before we begin:

If you've followed our ballot in last season's football blogpoll, then you are somewhat familiar with the process. Only voting on college basketball teams is WAY harder. There are games every night of the week and there are so few games on TV throughout the week that its hard to sit down and watch teams that aren't Boston College. (It's also hard to watch games with Boston College, for that matter. Damn you Time Warner and blocking ESPN 360!) Not to mention there are 3 times as many teams in Division I-A basketball than there is in Division I-A football. More teams, more games, more conferences ... all make this a lot tougher.

We've also been asked to explain a bit about our voting philosophy. Largely, we can't watch a ton of college basketball so we need to rely on a couple of factors in voting from week to week. Namely we are looking at:

• Overall resume including evaluating quality wins, bad losses and strength of schedule
• Emphasis on record against quality opponents (and we'll place more weight on this than bad losses to, say, Harvard)
• How you are playing lately, including evaluating a team's slate of games after appearing in our ballot
  
• Strength of your conference, but usually baked into a team's SOS
• Occasionally, we'll try to look at head to head matchups

For those that are new to the blogpoll, the drill is typically we'll publish our preliminary ballot and then you, our readers, partake in the "airing of grievances" in the comments section. We do read what you have to say, and it can (on occasion) change our ballot for the week.

We were all set to vote Boston College into the Top 25 this week (Coulter/Krugman be damned!), but that was before the Eagles got Teague-bagged in the second half of a 93-76 beatdown.

Finally, unlike our football poll, because there are too many D-IA teams, conferences and games, Jeff and I aren't going to submit separate ballots and average them out. Since we like to argue, we wouldn't be able to agree on a ballot of 25 hoops teams week to week before the next ballot was due!

We don't love this ballot - it's tough to jump into this voting thing midseason - so help us out in the comments section.

Rank	Team
1	Connecticut (22-1)
2	Oklahoma (23-1)
3	North Carolina (21-2)
4	Clemson (19-3)
5	Pittsburgh (21-2)
6	Duke (20-3)
7	Memphis (20-3)
8	Xavier (20-3)
9	Wake Forest (18-3)
10	Michigan St. (19-4)
11	Louisville (17-4)
12	Butler (21-2)
13	Marquette (20-3)
14	Villanova (19-4)
15	UCLA (19-4)
16	Kansas (19-4)
17	Missouri (20-4)
18	Gonzaga (17-5)
19	Florida St. (18-5)
20	Arizona St. (18-5)
21	Ohio St. (17-5)
22	Dayton (21-2)
23	Washington (16-6)
24	Illinois (18-5)
25	Utah (16-7)

By Conference: Atlantic Coast Conference 5, Big East 5, Big XII 3, Big Ten 3, Pac-10 3, Atlantic 10 2, Conference-USA 1, WCC 1, Horizon 1, Mountain West 1