The Third-Ranked Team in the Country Has Not Won a Game

On August 22, Portland played California to a scoreless draw. That is the entire body of evidence. Three days later, the United Soccer Coaches Men's Top 25 Poll moved the Pilots from sixth in the country to third.

Third. On a nil-nil.

It has not gone well since. Portland lost 4-2 at Washington on August 28. Then on Monday night the Pilots went to Myslik Field at Roberts Stadium and got shut out by Princeton, 2-0, in a match Princeton controlled from a standing start. Three matches into the season, the third-ranked team in men's college soccer has not won one.

This is what the last week of August does to a preseason poll, and it is worth watching closely, because the men's game is early enough in its calendar that the ballot and the results are still living in different countries. The poll we pulled on Tuesday morning is still the August 25 edition. It has Portland third. It has UConn eleventh after the Huskies opened the year at No. 1. It has NC State twentieth after opening second. Two weeks in and the top of the ballot has already been rearranged twice, which is not a scandal — it is what happens when voters have to guess in August and then find out in September.

The guess that has aged worst is the top three, and it is not only Portland.

San Diego went from eighteenth to second in the same ballot that elevated Portland, on the strength of a 2-1 win over Washington and a 3-1 win over Liberty. Since then the Toreros lost 1-0 at Stanford on August 27, and on Monday night they went to Harder Stadium and were held to a 1-1 draw by UC Santa Barbara, a team that has not lost a match this season and is not ranked at all. So the No. 2 team in the country has one loss and one draw in its last two, and the team that just took a point off it does not appear on the ballot.

Stanford is the one part of the top of the poll that has actually earned it. The Cardinal are 4-0-0, and Monday night they beat UC Davis 2-1. They also beat Grand Canyon 2-1, Denver 3-1, and, most usefully, San Diego 1-0. Every result is by one or two goals, which is not glamorous, but four wins in four tries against four different opponents is the only argument in this sport that never needs an asterisk.

Here is the part that ought to reorganize how you read the ballot. SMU is fifth. Wisconsin is twenty-third. They have identical records.

SMU is 4-0-0 and has scored fifteen goals and allowed one. The Mustangs beat Stetson 3-1, then went to Saint Louis and won 4-0, then handled Loyola Marymount 2-0, and on Monday night at the Washburne Soccer and Track Stadium they beat Houston Christian 6-0. That is a team that has stopped being polite about it.

Wisconsin is also 4-0-0, with fourteen goals scored and one allowed. Saint Mary's, 5-0. Oakland, 5-0. A 1-0 win on the road at Western Michigan, which is the hardest of the four and the one that says the most. Then Monday night at the McClimon Track/Soccer Complex, the Badgers beat Marquette 3-1 in a rivalry match that Marquette came into unbeaten.

Same record. Same goal differential, essentially. Eighteen spots apart. One of those numbers is measuring soccer and the other is measuring what people expected in July, and by the middle of September the poll will have quietly corrected itself and pretended it always knew.

Monday night produced one more result worth sitting with. Indiana, ranked fourteenth, went to Louisville and drew 1-1 at Dr. Mark and Cindy Lynn Stadium. Both teams are now unbeaten with a draw apiece, and Louisville has spent this season being harder to beat than its ranking — which is to say, it has no ranking. Around the rest of the board, Creighton won 5-0 at Tulsa, Memphis won 5-1 at Butler, Xavier won 3-2 at Northwestern, Notre Dame beat Harvard 3-1, and Wake Forest won 1-0 at Bowling Green in the sort of match that decides a conference table in November.

And Virginia keeps losing games by one goal. The Cavaliers fell 2-1 at home to Florida Gulf Coast at Klockner Stadium on Monday, which follows a 2-1 loss to UCLA and a 3-2 loss to High Point. One win in four, and all three defeats by a single goal. There is a version of that team that is fine and a version that is broken, and the difference between them is about four total minutes of concentration. Klockner Stadium has seen far better Augusts.

The takeaway is not that the poll is stupid. Polls are guesses with a deadline. The takeaway is that in men's college soccer, more than in almost any other sport on this calendar, the ballot is a lagging indicator by roughly two weeks, and right now the two weeks of lag are hiding the actual story: Stanford, SMU and Wisconsin are a combined 12-0-0 with thirty-plus goals between them, and two of the three teams ranked above Wisconsin are not winning.

Portland plays again with zero wins and a national ranking it did nothing to earn and will not keep. UC Santa Barbara is unbeaten and unranked. The next ballot will fix some of this. The results already did.