Nebraska Swept No. 2 Texas, and the Poll Split in Two

The scoreboard at T-Mobile Arena never got interesting. Nebraska 25, Texas 19. Nebraska 25, Texas 19 again. Nebraska 25, Texas 16. The preseason No. 1 played the preseason No. 2 in an NBA building in Las Vegas on Sunday, in the match that was supposed to be the marquee event of the young season, and it lasted three sets without ever once feeling close.

Volleyball keeps discovering it can fill rooms nobody built for it. Sunday's card stacked Nebraska against Texas and TCU against UNLV on the same floor in the same arena, a doubleheader assembled for exactly the audience that has turned this sport into appointment viewing over the last few seasons. The setting delivered. The main event did not, unless you came wearing red.

Texas is 2-2. Read that again and let it sit, because this is a program that won back-to-back national championships in 2022 and 2023 and has been handed the sport's benefit of the doubt every August since. Two weeks into the season the Longhorns have lost as many matches as they have won, and the latest one was a sweep in which they did not reach 20 in a single set. It is early. It is also a fact, and facts in late August have a way of turning into seeding lines in December.

Nebraska is 2-0 and there is no hidden box score to go hunting through. The set scores are the argument. The Cornhuskers won the first two by the identical margin and then widened the third, on a neutral floor, in a building where neither side had a home crowd to lean on. Strip out every advantage of environment and the gap was still six points, six points, and nine.

The same day, Pittsburgh did roughly the same thing to Wisconsin. 25-13, 25-21, 25-16 at the Petersen Events Center, against a team the preseason ballot ranked sixth. The opening set is the number that ought to worry people, because losing a set by 12 to a top-five opponent is not a slow start, it is a mismatch. Pittsburgh is 4-0 and has not been pushed by anybody yet. Wisconsin is 1-3.

Wisconsin at 1-3 is the harder case to wave off than Texas at 2-2. One set to 13, one to 16, and even the competitive set went the other way. Preseason sixth is a projection built in a room in early August. Three losses in four matches is a record built on the floor. The Badgers have most of a season to make the projection look right, and they are going to have to beat somebody legitimate to do it, because nothing about Sunday suggested it is close to happening on its own.

Put the two results side by side and the top of this poll has already cracked into tiers. Nebraska, Pittsburgh and Stanford are a combined 8-0. Texas and Wisconsin are a combined 3-5. Three weeks ago the preseason ballot listed all five inside the top six as though they were interchangeable. They are not interchangeable now, and the next ballot is going to have to say so.

Stanford had the messiest evening of the unbeatens. The Cardinal beat Kansas 3-1 and needed a 27-25 opening set to get there, then got run out of the third 25-14 before closing it 25-21. Kansas is 0-2 and spent one full set looking like the better team on the floor, which is worth filing away for the next time the Jayhawks turn up on somebody's schedule. Stanford is 2-0 and will happily take the ugly version.

Creighton lost the opening set to USC 25-23 at the Sanford Pentagon and then won three straight, 25-22, 25-21, 25-19, each one a shade more comfortable than the last. That is a specific and valuable kind of win, the sort where a team solves a problem in real time instead of waiting for the opponent to cool off on its own. Creighton is 2-1. USC is 1-1, and the Trojans have now been on the wrong end of two straight closing sets.

Penn State played two matches in one day at Rec Hall and nearly got clipped in the first one. High Point pushed the Nittany Lions to five sets before losing it. Penn State walked back out and swept Hofstra 3-0 in the nightcap. Two matches, one gym, one afternoon, and a ranked team that finished the day 2-0 without ever quite looking settled.

Below the ranked lines the visitors had a day. UMBC won in five at West Virginia. American University won 3-1 at Virginia. Xavier won 3-1 at Notre Dame. Loyola Marymount won 3-1 at Ole Miss. UC Santa Barbara swept Arizona inside McKale Center. UC San Diego beat Gonzaga 3-1, and Saint Mary's beat California in five. None of those are upsets in the strict poll sense, because none of the losing teams were ranked. All of them are the kind of early road result that decides whether a program is still in the conversation when the bracket gets built.

The rest of the ranked board held serve without much drama. Florida swept Stony Brook. Colorado swept Denver. North Carolina swept UNC Wilmington. Ohio State beat Northern Kentucky 3-1 and Illinois swept Syracuse. SMU needed all five sets to survive UC Davis, which is either a footnote or the first crack in something, and nobody gets to know which for another month. On Monday, Baylor handled Georgia Southern 3-1 at the Stan Sheriff Center.

Louisville hosts Dayton on Monday night to close the weekend out, and then the ballots go in. They should move a long way. A preseason poll is a guess wearing the costume of a ranking, and the guesses about Nebraska and Pittsburgh have looked sharper every time either team has walked onto a floor, while the guesses about Texas and Wisconsin now have two weeks of evidence stacked against them. The next AVCA poll is the first one anybody has to take seriously.