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The Preseason Top 25, Two Weeks On
Nebraska took 57 first-place votes and 1,568 points on 10 August. Two weekends later the coaches have kept four of that top five, and the one they dropped is Texas.
Nebraska opened the season at No. 1 in the AVCA coaches poll with 57 of the 63 first-place votes and 1,568 points. The four teams behind it were Texas, Kentucky, Pittsburgh and Stanford.
The gap from Nebraska to Texas was 141 points. The gap from Texas to Kentucky was 29, and from Kentucky to Pitt it was 15. Three of the top four were separated by less than one team worth of daylight.
Texas A&M, which won the national championship in December, opened eighth on 1,089 points, behind Wisconsin and Louisville. Purdue and Penn State closed out the top ten.
The other five first-place votes went to Texas, Kentucky and Texas A&M. Only three programs in the country got a single coach to put them ahead of Nebraska.
SMU debuted eleventh and Arizona State twelfth. The Big Ten put eight programs in the top 25, more than any other conference.
Two Weeks Later the Poll Was Mostly Right
The coaches voted again on 31 August, after two weekends of volleyball. Nebraska is still first, Pittsburgh has moved from fourth to second, Kentucky is still third and Stanford is still fourth.
Four of the preseason top five are still in the top five. The one that left is Texas, which is 2-2 and ninth.
Arizona State went from twelfth to seventh and SMU from eleventh to eighth. Creighton came into the top ten, and Purdue, which opened the season inside it, is fourteenth at 0-1.
The dissent narrowed rather than spread. Three programs took a first-place vote in the preseason poll and only Pittsburgh takes one now, with six of the 63.
A preseason poll is a guess that everybody agrees to publish. This one lost one team out of five in a fortnight, and the team it lost is the one that has been beaten twice.
