On Saturday, as they're wont to do, the Illini struggled against a team it has no right struggling against. At least, not if the Illini are actually a team that deserve to be ranked as highly as they have been for most of the season.

However, even though we crawled to an 81-79 victory against a very bad Auburn team, the Illini still found themselves moving up in both polls this week. When they were released on Monday afternoon the Illini found themselves ranked #11 in the AP (up from #12 last week) and #14 in the Coaches Poll (up from #15 last week).

If you're wondering, and since we can look it up, the Illini appeared on all 65 ballots that were turned in for the AP Poll this week. The highest they were ranked was #7 by the Daily Journal's Eric Sprott who had the Illini ranked two spots ahead of a Missouri team that just beat us on a neutral court.

Apparently Mr. Sprott suffers from short-term memory loss. Stop smoking so much weed, Eric.

The lowest we appeared on any ballot was #18 by three different voters: the Albuquerque Journal's Geoff Grammer, the Tampa Tribune's Joey Johnston and the Daily Camera's Ryan Thorburn. Nothing about their three ballots stands out as idiotic to me, and frankly, I think they're a lot closer to being right with the Illini at #18 than everybody else was who has us higher.

But I'm just a HATER hatin' y'all.