I can’t complain about this one so much. BYU remain on top, of course, with 15 of 16 first-place votes. I only recently found out this is not a secret ballot — the AVCA actually publish each ballot, though it seems they’re not all counted each week. Thus, we know it was Pacific coach Joe Wortmann who still voted UC Irvine #1. Seeing this also made me interested to see whose ballot is most like mine, and that’d be probably Harvard coach Brian Baise, though the biggest difference between my ballot and Baise’s is Harvard themselves — he didn’t vote his team a ranking (and it’s perfectly permissible to do so).
Stanford fall only to #6, which I sort of thought would be the case. Most voters pegged them there directly, though Baise’s vote actually had them all the way down in 10th. Pepperdine and UCLA move up a rank each at the Cardinal’s expense. Lewis and Cal-State Northridge swap positions, though the margin between them is just a single point. Hawaii move up a rank to #10, but the big winner this week is UCSB, jumping three ranks to get to #11. And finally, 9 straight losses were enough to drop Pacific from the rankings, as surprisingly George Mason enter the poll, for the first time since the preseason.
Five teams appear in ‘also receiving votes,’ while two go unnamed. Since the votes themselves are published, I don’t know what the point of not naming them is (UCI’s David Kniffin voted IPFW 13th and Joe Wortmann voted UC San Diego 14th). You can view the complete poll here. There’s no way to directly link to the listing of the actual ballots themselves, as it’s an Excel file. Just go to the main page for men’s volleyball polls, and click on ‘DI-II Poll Voters Ballots’ in the lower-left corner. Some fascinating stuff.
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