Duke

As you may have heard, Duke dropped out of the coaches' poll for the first time ever, and are out of the AP Top 25 for the first time in 200 weeks. The news certainly raised my eyebrows.

Don't get me wrong: I don't think the Devils are a top 25 team. I said as much when they struggled at the beginning of the year, and I've maintained that position. I wondered aloud this past weekend, in fact, what the Devils (and Alabama, for that matter) had to do to drop out of the polls.

But I never expected it to happen, because the Devils were safely in the mid-teens range. And -- while I do think that Duke being out of the top 25 is no great injustice -- I do think it's wrong that they fell that far based on the week's results. They played extremely well midweek before falling to a deeper, more talented North Carolina team, then rallied valiantly after a slow start before coming up short at Maryland on Sunday. February is too late in the season for such drastic swings to occur. The problem is not that Duke is out -- it's that they were as highly-ranked as they were heading into the game with Carolina.