Evidently, the date has to do with navigating between the blogs (date vs previous/next) and not how they show up on my page. Google is telling me this issue is in the theme, as WordPress is set to automatically order the blogs with the newest first. So why are the blogs showing up in alphabetical order?
I apologize for this post. I discovered that my co-admin had made the top post sticky, which coincidentally made the blogs appear in alphabetical order. I just spent far too much time figuring this out, LOL