As always, thanks to everyone for the feedback. Your feedback is appreciated, and keeps this wild guess from being a complete farce. (90% farce? Sure. But not 100%, and that 10% is critical. It's the special teams of farce.) I suspect we're in the running for whichever ballot has the most week-to-week fluctuation (I forget if that's Mr. Manic-Depressive or if it's another award - with a delta of 90, we've got a good chance!), but there's not much to be done when you go from a sample size of zero to a sample size of one and all our standard deviations are still infinity.

Rocky Top Talk Ballot - Week 2

Rank	Team	Delta
1	LSU Tigers	5
2	Boise St. Broncos	3
3	Alabama Crimson Tide	-2
4	Oklahoma Sooners	-2
5	Stanford Cardinal	4
6	Wisconsin Badgers	-3
7	Texas A&M Aggies	--
8	Nebraska Cornhuskers	--
9	Florida St. Seminoles	2
10	Oregon Ducks	-6
11	Virginia Tech Hokies	3
12	Ohio St. Buckeyes	3
13	Arkansas Razorbacks	3
14	South Carolina Gamecocks	-4
15	Mississippi St. Bulldogs	3
16	Oklahoma St. Cowboys	-3
17	Arizona St. Sun Devils	6
18	Baylor Bears	--
19	BYU Cougars	--
20	South Florida Bulls	--
21	West Virginia Mountaineers	--
22	Texas Longhorns	2
23	Northwestern Wildcats	--
24	Northern Illinois Huskies	--
25	Central Florida Knights	--
Dropouts: Notre Dame Fighting Irish, TCU Horned Frogs, Michigan St. Spartans, Georgia Bulldogs, Missouri Tigers, Air Force Falcons

SB Nation BlogPoll College Football Top 25 Rankings "

Once again, this is a couple of days earlier than last year. Why is that? Well, the mothership wants to release on Monday instead of Wednesday, and so now we release on Monday instead of Wednesday. Since there's not a whole lot else to do at this point, let's talk stats below the jump.

So last week, I outlined what we did last year. Let's go through some of the comments and make adjustments to the rankings.

• I feel pretty confident dropping Turnover Margin entirely. Fumbles - even with what happened with us last week - are kind of fluky (heck, recovering all 8 fumbles can be seen as fluky), With interceptions going into pass efficiency offense and pass efficiency defense, we can probably safely ignore this entirely.
• To that end, I'm happy adding rushing offense at the same emphasis as turnover margin (2/81).
• I like what Hooper suggests in the comments about combining win% and cumulative scoring margin, but I'm still a little conflicted on the implementation of it. I don't think we came close to figuring out how to do this. Incidentally, if we do this we can probably drop Opponents' Points Per Game, else we'd run into a double-counting problem (or a cumulative scoring margin can replace that, either way).
  
• No feedback on net punting or big plays last week - any insights?
• If someone's looking for time to kill, I'd greatly appreciate someone combing the NCAA released data to see if they have down-and-distance metrics in there. That will help resolve the 3rd down things I'd like to do.

Once again, if anyone else has brilliant ideas, that'd be appreciated.