The tendency of most polls is that when a team wins, they move up; when they lose, they move down; when they don’t play, they usually either stay the same or move down.

There will come a point when the teams that started in Sept will be done with their schedule, and most likely they will not move higher than where they are at that point. Then the teams that are still playing have the advantage to leapfrog those who are done playing simply by virtue of recency bias and not because they’re actually better.