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Poll Takeaways: Wisconsin Ranked Fifth at 1-3
Texas fell seven places to No. 9 and Arizona State climbed five to No. 7, but nine of the 25 teams did not move at all and nobody entered or left.
The AVCA published its first in-season poll of 2026 on Monday, and the team ranked fifth in it has lost three of its four matches. Wisconsin is 1-3.
The preseason ballot had stood since 10 August, so this was the first vote the coaches had cast on anything that actually happened on a court rather than on a roster sheet.
They moved almost nobody who mattered. Nine of the 25 teams sit exactly where they started, no team entered the poll, and no team left it, after a week that put five ranked sides against other ranked sides.
Nebraska stayed first on 57 of the 63 first-place votes and 1,569 points. Pittsburgh took the other six, went 4-0 in the opening week and climbed from fourth to second on 1,510.
Six coaches out of 63 think the country has the wrong team at No. 1. That is the entire disagreement at the top of this sport in September.
Wisconsin's Fifth Place Is a Bet on Last Year
Pittsburgh beat Wisconsin 25-13, 25-21, 25-16 on Sunday, in front of 4,643 people at the Petersen Events Center. The poll published the next afternoon moved Wisconsin up a place.
Wisconsin hit .079 in that match, on 33 kills against 24 errors from 114 swings. The Badgers served no aces at all, put up five team blocks, and their two leading hitters managed seven kills each.
Pittsburgh hit .264, on 39 kills against 11 errors from 106 swings. The Panthers served four aces, put up 11 team blocks, and Olivia Babcock alone had 17 kills at a .361 clip.
Both schools' official box scores agree on every one of those figures. Twenty-four attacking errors is the number the coaches were handed, and Lynney Tarnow and Grace Lopez are the hitters it was taken out of.
Pittsburgh had already beaten Kentucky in Milwaukee a week earlier, so the poll's new No. 2 has now taken down the teams currently ranked third and fifth inside a fortnight.
They weighed all of that and moved Wisconsin up one place, which is a vote cast for a roster rather than for anything that has happened yet.
Wisconsin is not the only losing record in the top 25. Purdue sits 14th at 0-1, Kansas 16th at 0-2 and Indiana 21st at 0-1, and none of the three has yet won a match.
Texas Fell Further Than Anyone Else
Texas went from second to ninth, a drop of seven places, and no other team on the ballot moved more than five in either direction while the Longhorns were going 2-2.
They lost their opener to Arizona State and were swept by Nebraska in Las Vegas on Sunday. Arizona State climbed five places to seventh, which is what beating the No. 2 team in the country buys.
Southern California climbed five to 15th, SMU rose three to eighth at 3-0, Creighton three to 10th, and Texas A&M, which took the national championship in December, fell four to 12th.
Purdue and Indiana each fell five without playing a second match. Those six are the only teams on the ballot that moved more than three places, and the other ten that moved at all moved one, two or three.
Nine Teams Did Not Move at All
Nebraska, Kentucky, Florida, TCU, North Carolina, Tennessee, Colorado, BYU and Oregon are all sitting on the number they were handed on 10 August. Read the list once and the poll's character is in it.
Seven of the nine are outside the top 15, which is where a coach has the least reason to spend a vote on a rearrangement. The other two are the teams nobody was arguing about.
The opening week produced a No. 2 beaten twice, a defending national champion at 3-2 and a top-six team at 1-3, and the ballot absorbed it by moving sixteen teams a place or two and admitting nobody.
Thirteen of these 25 start the first Big Ten/SEC Challenge Week on Tuesday. Eighteen Big Ten teams and 16 from the SEC play 30 matches across six days, so next Monday's ballot will have far more to work with.
The coaches were handed a week of results and voted their August roster sheets back at us. That is a defensible thing to do in September and it is not a ranking of anything that has been played.
