After beating Villanova today, the St. John’s Red Storm has victories over Georgetown, Notre Dame, Duke, UCONN, Pitt, and Villanova. They’ve risen from being an unranked team to being the #25 team in the country, and should continue to climb once the new rankings come out.
Shouldn’t they be higher? Like, much higher? I guess voters are reluctant to place a team with nine losses too high. To be fair, no team ranked ahead of them had lost as many games as of the time last week’s rankings came out.
Ok, fine. Don’t voters, though, look closely at the quality of the opponents? If so, didn’t they look at the Red Storm’s schedule and see that five of St. John’s losses came to teams consistently ranked within the top 25 this year — some even in the top ten: Notre Dame, Syracuse, Georgetown, Louisville, and St. Mary’s. Of those five teams, St. John’s avenged its loss against two of them: Notre Dame and Georgetown, splitting its season series with each of those teams.
It’s hard to imagine that a team from New York could be underrated, and it’s particularly hard to imagine that happening if it’s a Big East team from New York that has beaten Duke. Yet, that seems to be what’s happening.
Perhaps the Red Storm will shoot up the rankings this week, or earn a high seed in the NCAA tournament in spite of a relatively low ranking in the polls, and this will all be moot. For now, all that’s clear is that St. John’s is a force, and teams with championship aspirations should hope that they’re able to stay out of the path of this Storm for a long time.