So first, let me say that AP rankings don't mean that much to me and I don't really care if Gary Parrish thinks Purdue is great or Purdue stinks. I don't want to get into the in's and out's of why we should be No. 1 over Houston or Virginia or Connecticut should be No. 1 over us (at least not in December). My Purdue season goals every year (in order) are: NC, Final Four, Elite Eight, Big Ten Conference Championship, Sweet Sixteen, Big Ten Tournament Championship, make the NCAA tournament, beat IU (hopefully 2 or 3 times), be over .500 in conference.

As you can see, being ranked AP#1 isn't on that list. HOWEVER, it would be nice to follow-up a first ever AP#1 ranking (for a week) with a much longer stay this year. Not to mention what it means as a program to start stacking seasons where we are ranked highly throughout the year). In that vein, I note that this Saturday afternoon should be an interesting basketball watching game for Boiler fans (assuming, knock-on-wood, that we take care of business, hopefully handily, v. Hofstra tonight in a game I will have to listen to on Varsity network).

At 2:15pm we have a game that may end up being our most difficult of the season so far. Really happy Nebraska beat Creighton (at Creighton nonetheless) as it should totally open up the eyes of anybody on our team that thought at Nebraska would be a cakewalk. And while that arena may not be as much kryptonite to us as the RAC, it is up there and we have struggled many times in games there that we ended up winning. And that place will be rockin! I will be happy with getting out of there with a W by any means necessary and I think, especially given the Creighton win, the voters will see any win there as a "good" one.

Hopefully, thereafter we can turn over to watch Alabama on ABC finishing off Houston (@Houston) resulting in a vaulting of Purdue back to No. 1 (I think we would leapfrog Virginia in that case).

Interestingly, even if Houston wins that game, they have a pretty good chance of losing at Virginia next Saturday. Of course, Virginia winning that game, even if Houston has already lost, may vault them over us assuming they don't lose in the interim.

The good news is is that after Nebraska, we don't have any obvious stumbles until January 5th at OSU. In any event, I am excited to watch this weekend.