Ball and Oats: Alabama Basketball up to No. 4 in AP Poll — and may be underrated

The latest AP poll just dropped, and the Alabama Crimson Tide are all the way up to No. 4, behind one-loss Kansas, Purdue, and Houston, who the Tide defeated on the road back in December.

How Houston is No. 1 is simply baffling though. The Cougars have nine Quad Four wins. No other team in the Top 25 has even played nine Q4 games. Only one other team in the Top 200 has played nine Q4 games — those brave LSU Tigers.

We’ll have more data analyses when we do Points in the Paint later this week, but that is simply inexcusable. Purdue, sure. They’re very good: sitting at 6-1 vs. Q1 / Q2. And Kansas is 7-1 against the same, plus the Jayhawks have the No. 3 overall SOS. But Houston is just 4-1 in those sorts of games, and has fattened up on a lot of dreck: half their wins, in fact, of their 128th-ranked SOS.

I mean, if you want to put Tennessee up there, sure. Mizzou? Arkansas? Maybe. But Houston? We’ve settled this on the court twice already...and it looks like we may have to do so again in March.

As for underrated? Yeah, national hoops heads are feeling it, putting Alabama in the Top 2-3.

FWIW, that Top 5 is almost identical to how I would rank them, swapping only Purdue and Houston. Though, given their superior SOS, you could talk me into putting UConn 5th and UH 6th as well. For now, I’ve no problem declaring KU the best team in the country — they’ve done the most against the hardest.

We need only wait for the second round when they implode again.