Coach Questions Ranking

Marquette squeaked into the No. 25 spot of the AP men’s college basketball poll this week, but coach Mike Deane said he isn’t certain his team belongs.

“We aren’t a great team or a spectacular team, but we played well to date,” Deane said of his 8-0 team. “I don’t think of us as a Top 25 team.”

North Carolina easily held the No. 1 spot, receiving 69 first-place votes and 1,749 points from a 70-member media panel. It was the third straight week North Carolina (13-0) has been top ranked under first-year coach Bill Guthridge.

Kansas (15-1) held second with 1,646 points, 16 more than Duke (10-1), which had the other first-place vote. Utah and Purdue both jumped two spots to fourth and fifth, respectively, while Kentucky, which lost at home to Louisville, fell two places to sixth.

The next three spots were held by Pac-10 teams - Stanford, Arizona and UCLA - while Connecticut rounded out the Top Ten.

Tennessee remained a unanimous No. 1 in the AP women’s basketball poll, and the Vols did it the easy way - by not playing.

Only 13 ranked teams did play in the past week and just one lost to a team that wasn’t ranked.

Tennessee (13-0), which returns to action New Year’s Day against No. 25 Arkansas, received all 38 first-place votes from a national media panel. The Vols have been No. 1 all season and have been a unanimous choice for the last six weeks.

Louisiana Tech is the only other team that has gotten any first-place votes this season.