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Welcome to Good Morning, Illini Nation, your daily dose of college basketball news from Illini beat writer and AP Top 25 voter Scott Richey. Hell offer up insights every morning on Brad Underwoods team:

Illinois was again on the outside looking in when the latest Associated Press Top 25 poll was released late Monday morning. The Illini were among the 17 other teams receiving votes and nominally "ranked" 29th in the nation. Let's dive a little deeper on this week's voting:

Illinois drew votes on 16 ballots this week, which was double what it got last week. The Kansas City Star's Jesse Newell, who is on record for basing his vote mostly off advanced metrics, which are called the "computer numbers" in college hoops circles, moved the Illini up from 18th to 13th this week. That comes after a similar move in said computer numbers following the blowout win against St. Francis (Pa.).

Both voters in the state of Illinois (myself and colleague Steve Greenberg from the Sun-Times) voted Illinois at No. 25 this week. I can't speak for Steve, but my vote for the Illini was based on a combination of other teams losing and needing a 25th team. Illinois, with four top 100 KenPom wins, had as good a resume as any.

I'll never catch Newell for "most extreme" ballot, but I did move into second place in that regard. The "extreme" nature of my ballot (again, that's ranking a team five or more spots from where it actually ends up on the poll) is basically centered around having Xavier higher and Houston lowerthan most voters. I had seven "extreme" picks out of 25 this week.

No one voted San Francisco or Minnesota higher than I did, and no one voted Houston lower. Only one voter, the New Haven Register's Dave Borges, ranked Xavier higher than I did. How two voters aren't even including the Musketeers boggles my mind. Xavier has both the computer numbers (23rd in KenPom and 12th in Torvik with preseason bias weeded out) and, you know, actual good wins (Ohio State, Virginia Tech, Oklahoma State, Cincinnati and Marquette are all top 100 quality).

It wasn't a unanimous week for Baylor at No. 1 after getting all the votes a week ago. Former News-Gazette beat writer Paul Klee changed his vote to Arizona this week. Baylor did struggle a bit before rallying to beat Oregon to end last week, but similarly unbeaten Arizona didn't exactly add a big one to its resume with wins against Northern Colorado and Cal Baptist. Having seen the Wildcats in person, of course, I can confirm they're legit.

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Good Morning, Illini Nation: Deep dive on the AP Top 25 - Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette