If there are 25 teams with better resumes than Kentucky, then yes, Kentucky would not be in the top 25. I don’t think that’s a hard concept. Resumes change from week to week. Even if Kentucky’s resume didn’t change, other teams’ did. And if enough of those teams got better resumes while Kentucky’s stayed the same to the point where Kentucky no longer has one of the top 25 resumes in the nation, they should not be ranked in the top 25. Please tell me what is wrong with this.

I agree with your last point that how they played is taken into account. Kentucky almost lost to Middle Tennessee State. So it was taken into consideration, I’m sure.

You were asking for a factual determination of whether Kentucky would have dropped out of the top 25 in this particular poll if they had been idle instead of lost. You’re right, only PB can answer. Perhaps he treated the close loss to the #1 team as equal to their current resume (i.e. their resume is exactly the same) and just thought that enough other teams passed them to knock them out. Perhaps he treated the loss as a slight ding (but not much of a hit to the resume because Alabama’s good and the game was close).

It’s up to a particular resume-ranker how much value they assign to a loss to a good team versus a loss to a mediocre team versus a win against a bad team, etc. Everyone has slightly different methodologies for how they calculate the worth of a resume. And no matter how well Kentucky played, they still have a 1 in the loss column. That counts for something, certainly. Maybe you think it counts for less than PB does, I don’t know. But it’s a piece of data that every resume ranker takes into consideration when coming up with his rankings.

I absolutely get what you’re saying, and I think you’re perfectly justified in deciding for yourself that Kentucky’s resume on the whole remains stronger than Wake’s, insofar as you think their close loss to Alabama is—if not quite a positive—not a loss you count against them too much. I don’t think you’re crazy for thinking that, though I’m a little surprised that my own reasoning strikes anyone as a stretch.

In any case, the issue is not whether Kentucky was idle last week, or even whether they lost or if they won: All that matters is their body of work as compared to other teams’ bodies of work. In this case, I see one loss, one decent win, and nothing else. And in my mind that’s not as good as what Wake Forest has done, for example.

I think both value judgments are defensible, so we can agree to disagree on this one.