BlogPoller Disorder: Forget Everything You Think You Know

by CornFromAJar on Oct 15, 2007 10:16 PM EDT Comment 4 comments

As I said at the begining of the year: Hey, Kool-Aid!

Rank	Team	Delta
1	South Florida	2
2	LSU	1
3	Ohio State	2
4	Boston College	--
5	Oklahoma	4
6	California	4
7	Oregon	1
8	South Carolina	--
9	Kentucky	3
10	Kansas	7
11	Auburn	13
12	Florida	8
13	Arizona State	3
14	Missouri	7
15	Southern Cal	2
16	Virginia Tech	6
17	West Virginia	6
18	Penn State	8
19	Tennessee	3
20	Michigan	6
21	Cincinnati	7
22	Kansas State	4
23	Texas Tech	3
24	Georgia	1
25	Hawaii	4

Dropped Out: Florida State (#15), Illinois (#18), Wisconsin (#19), Purdue (#23).

As you can see, there's no Florida State, which means Joel has the week off from BlogPollin' and yours truly is back in the driver's seat.

We start with USF, which looks really odd at the top of any poll. But, if you took the Bull logo off the gold helmets and called them Notre Dame, they'd be No. 1 easily. Brian makes an excellent case for LSU to remain at the top, and I'm willing to listen to y'all if you agree. But I don't think USF can be any lower than second with wins, ugly as they were, over Auburn and West Virginia.

I like the rest of the top ten, even with UK and KU in it. This is football, right? I'm confusing myself.

Arizona State could be higher, could be lower, I don't know much about them. Help there would be appreciated. Also, about So Cal: they have probably the greatest collection of individual talent in college football, but they sure don't play like it. They haven't looked much better than average. Part of that is because they play in a pretty good conference that we in the South don't give enough credit to, and part of it is because they've just looked average.

Tennessee at #19: homerism maybe, but if the improvements we've seen over the last couple of weeks are for real, then the Vols are playing some pretty good football. We'll find out in the next couple of weeks.

Spots 21-25 are guesswork as normal.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

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Comments

Yuck

Illinois unranked? Behind 2 loss Penn State who Illinois beat?

ASU should be in your top 10. :)

by The Power T on Oct 15, 2007 11:05 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

I don't buy it

I don't buy Brian's case. Granted, my CFB knowledge is FAR inferior to his, but didn't Orson and Peter establish some "Rules" earlier this Summer? A win is a win, right? Regardless of how "pretty" or "ugly" or "pretty ugly" the victory was? Do I think LSU is still at top-5 team...certainly! Worthy of #1 right now...nope. Let USF have their day in the sunshine. If/when they loose, they'll certainly fall to the mid teens, even if they loose by a 2-pt conversion in the 6th overtime against a future ranked opponent.

Likes:

Vols and Wolverines are up and coming (again).
Guess that's about it.

Dislikes:
-Auburn ranked WAY too high. (perhaps mid-lower teen)
-Gators last 3 weeks: Loss, Loss, bye = net drop of 10? Hardly right, but they're still a darned good team.

There's a heck of a lot more dislikes, but the more I look at it, it seems about right. That's just wrong. But in a right kind of way.

by Aerobab on Oct 15, 2007 11:29 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

At this point in the season

it's really hard to criticize any reasonable ranking list. In a season as wild as this one, I'm willing to accept a lot of variance on the rankings without blinking. Tennessee in the 18-24 range is about right. Florida in the 10-15 is okay with me. Boston College seems like a team that should be lower, but why?

I say: leave it be, and buy yourself some extra time this week. Besides, it's not like it's the final poll of the season.

by Hooper on Oct 16, 2007 12:25 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

hmmm...

I seem to remember that one of the main criteria of the Blogpoll was head-to-head on a neutral field.

Now I know that USF has been great this year, but I can't bring myself to truly believe that they're taking down LSU, Ohio State, or any number of top teams on a neutral field.

They have taken down the teams that they are familiar with, i.e. conference foes. They've also taken down Auburn before Auburn because the confident team that took over the Swamp. Perhaps I'm biased, but until USF can show that they can take down a major non-conference player on a big stage, they can't be #1 in my book.

I do agree that the way Tennessee has been playing lately warrants your ranking. We'll see if they can keep it up in a hostile environment.

by Spirit of the Hill on Oct 16, 2007 9:57 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs