Eight Ranked Teams Went on the Road Thursday. Three Won.

Thursday we counted the road trips. Here is the ledger. Eight teams from the United Soccer Coaches and IWSOC women's top 25 played away from home, and they came back with three wins, three losses and two draws. Spread that across a poll and it looks tidy. Spread it across eight programs that all thought they were the better team, and it is a rough night.

Stanford handled its share. The Cardinal beat UCLA 3-0 at Maloney Field in a 10:30 p.m. Eastern kickoff, pushing to 4-0-0 with twelve goals scored and none allowed. Four matches, four clean sheets, and the last three came against Georgetown, UC Irvine and a UCLA side that arrived 1-1-1 and ranked seventeenth. Stanford holds seven of the poll's first-place votes and has not yet had to defend a lead.

Wake Forest is the only other team in the top 25 that has not conceded. The Demon Deacons are 4-0-0 with eight goals for and none against, and they did not play Thursday. Two teams, eight matches, zero goals allowed between them. The profiles could not be more different. Stanford is winning 6-0 and 3-0. Wake Forest is winning 2-0 and 1-0, and beat Old Dominion by a single goal four days before Duke did the same thing.

Duke made its trip pay, 2-1 at Old Dominion. The Blue Devils are 4-0-1, the draw a 1-1 result at UCLA in their second match, and they have sixteen goals in five games. Old Dominion sits at 1-4-0, and every loss on that record is the respectable kind: 2-1 at Virginia Tech, 2-1 at UNC Wilmington, 1-0 at Wake Forest, and now a one-goal defeat to the second-ranked team in the country.

Vanderbilt won 3-1 at Rice to stay perfect at 4-0-0. The Commodores share the No. 3 line with Michigan State this week and hold the only first-place vote that did not go to Stanford. Fifteen goals in four matches, and the run includes a 4-3 win over SMU that remains the wildest scoreline any top-five team has been part of this season.

Michigan State's night went the other way. The Spartans, who share that same No. 3 line, were held scoreless at home by Eastern Michigan, a 0-0 draw at DeMartin Stadium four days after they won 3-2 at North Carolina. Eastern Michigan came in 1-1-1 and left East Lansing with a point and a clean sheet.

Colorado had the identical experience two hours away. The Buffaloes went to Western Michigan and did not score, a 0-0 draw at the WMU Soccer Complex against a team now sitting 1-0-2. Colorado had scored eleven goals in three matches to that point, a 2-1 win over Colorado State, a 6-0 win over Army and a 3-2 win over Cal State Fullerton, and then spent ninety minutes in Kalamazoo without one. Two teams inside the top twelve were blanked on the same afternoon by two schools from the same league.

The two outright defeats came off the same line of the ballot. This week's poll has a three-way tie at seventeenth between Georgia, Kansas and UCLA, and all three lost Thursday. Georgia lost 3-2 at TCU. Kansas lost 2-1 at Utah Valley. UCLA was the team Stanford shut out. A tie usually means voters could not separate three teams. One evening separated them.

Memphis produced the most awkward result for anyone who reads rankings literally. The Tigers are ranked twenty-fourth with a losing record. They arrived at 1-2-0, having lost 2-1 to Alabama and 4-1 at Vanderbilt, and they went to Oxford and beat an unbeaten Ole Miss team 3-1. Ole Miss was 4-0-0 and unranked. Both things were true at the same time, which is the sort of arithmetic August inflicts on a poll.

Alabama is the only team in the top 25 with five wins. The Crimson Tide beat Troy 3-0 at the Alabama Soccer Complex to reach 5-0-0, a start that includes wins at Saint Louis, at Memphis and at Nebraska plus a 3-2 result against TCU. Nobody ranked has played more matches. Nobody ranked has lost fewer.

Zoom out and the poll is still remarkably intact. Fifteen of the twenty-five ranked teams have not lost a match this season, a group that includes four programs that did not play Thursday at all. Tennessee is 4-0-0 with fourteen goals scored and one allowed. West Virginia is 3-0-0. Virginia is 3-0-0. Wake Forest has the shutout streak. Three weeks into a season is early enough that unbeaten records are partly a schedule artifact, and it is also the only currency August pays out in.

Ohio State beat Kentucky 2-1 at Jesse Owens Memorial Stadium in the night's sharpest clash of styles. Kentucky arrived 3-0-0 having scored sixteen goals in three matches, results of 6-0, 5-2 and 5-0, and managed one in Columbus. Ohio State is 2-0-1 and has scored three goals all season while allowing a single one. Elsewhere, Florida beat Jacksonville 6-0, UCF beat UAB 3-1 to reach 4-0-0, BYU beat Minnesota 1-0, Washington drew 1-1 with Gonzaga, and Texas State beat East Texas A&M 2-0.

Notre Dame and Michigan drew 1-1 at U-M Soccer Stadium, and neither column moved in a way that clarifies anything. Notre Dame is 1-0-4, unbeaten with one win, a season that has produced a decision exactly once. Michigan is 0-0-3, three matches, three ties, no win and no loss. Eight matches between them, one victory total. Notre Dame is still ranked twenty-fifth. It was eighth in last week's ballot.

Sunday has the game that matters. Colorado goes to Michigan State at DeMartin Stadium at 11 a.m. Eastern, the only ranked-versus-ranked women's match on the weekend board, between the two teams that could not find a goal on Thursday. One of them will. The rest of the top 25 draws a soft Sunday, with Stanford hosting Cal State Fullerton, Duke hosting VCU, Alabama at South Alabama and West Virginia at Army, which means the ballot released Monday gets decided by ninety minutes in East Lansing and very little else.