Hoops: Bulldogs come in at No. 28

The preseason AP men's basketball poll is out, and Georgia barely missed being in the top 25.

Georgia is third in the also-receiving-votes section, with 68 votes. The Bulldogs, who had a losing record last year, are one spot ahead of West Virginia, which was in the Final Four.

If things break their way early, the Bulldogs are poised to be ranked in the AP men's basketball poll for the first time since the end of the 2003 season, when they were 21st.

Among SEC teams, Florida was ninth, Kentucky came in at No. 11, and Tennessee was No. 23. There were 14 votes for Vanderbilt, and seven for Mississippi State.

You can see each voter's ballot here.

Georgia was not on the ballot of a Athens Banner-Herald beat writer Roger Clarkson (the audacity!) or the national writers: ESPN's Dick Vitale, SI.com's Seth Davis, Foxsports' Jeff Goodman and NPR's John Feinstein. (He was apparently subbing for Juan Williams.)

NY Daily News writer Dick "Hoops" Weiss, a legend in the business, also left Georgia off his ballot.

But Georgia got a huge amount of love from longtime Kentucky beat writer Jerry Tipton, who put the Bulldogs No. 12. Ron Morris, my former colleague at The State in Columbia, S.C., also put the Bulldogs at No. 14. And Jeff Lockridge of The Tennessean, in Nashville, had Georgia at No. 16.