College basketball polls are dumb. In a world of KenPom, Torvik, and a thousand other metrics, you really don’t need the opinion of a sportswriter who probably can’t pronounce your team correctly to tell you whether they are better than UCLA or not. They are an anachronism.
But, like so many other anachronisms, they carry with them an inexplicable air of romance and, more importantly for the basketball fan, fun. The AP poll is out? It’s time to rage that my team isn’t higher, see who is #1, figure out who the committee might be shading this year, and see which of the big teams have big games coming up.