College BlogPoll Ballot: Week 8 Draft

As always, the draft ballot, which is due by Monday morning, is simply the rankings as given by RTT's own computer system.  The final ballot, which is due on Wednesday morning, will be a modified version based on the commentary received on the draft.  So here are the top 25 in the draft.  The full rankings will follow below, along with some brief observations.

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Florida
2	Alabama
3	Texas
4	TCU	2
5	Iowa	3
6	Penn State	7
7	Boise State	2
8	Southern Cal	1
9	Cincinnati	1
10	Oregon	2
11	Virginia Tech	7
12	Georgia Tech	8
13	Arizona	9
14	LSU	3
15	Pittsburgh
16	Utah	2
17	West Virginia	2
18	Miami (Florida)	3
19	Ohio State	8
20	Brigham Young	4
21	Oklahoma	3
22	South Carolina	3
23	Oklahoma State
24	Mississippi
25	Central Michigan
Last week's ballot

The big table shows all of the numbers in their grand glory.  If you wish to experiment, here is the data in Excel 2007
form, and in Excel 2003 form.  If you're not one for the numbers, just scroll past them to the comments.

Observations:

• The TCU Horned Frogs like the top 5, thank you very much.  I'm not saying I can't be persuaded again, but I'll need a pretty good argument this time.  That was one very dominant performance against a BYU team that is actually quite good.  Going forward, they only have Utah to worry about, as the rest of their schedule is against the bottom half of the MWC.
• Penn State Nittany Lions at it again.  I'm pretty sure everybody here will want PSU knocked down manually.  Just be sure to include reasons for it - preferably (but not mandatorily) reasons that relate to the numbers.
• Cincinnati Bearcats.  I want 'em up there, too, especially after a solid game without Tony Pike.  It's still a strength of schedule issue (which, by the way, is slowly eroding the Boise State Bronco's grip).  With the Connecticut Huskies, West Virginia Mountaineers, and Pittsburgh Panthers on the schedule, Cincinnati is set to make a major push late.
• USC Trojans.  A passing efficiency of 0.817 is very good - especially for having a freshman quarterback.  Somebody tell Charlie Weis that a pro-style offense can indeed be implemented with a new quarterback.  Oh, right, they already did.
• Dominance Redacted.  The Texas Longhorns finally played a solid game or two, and now they are virtually neck and neck with the Alabama Crimson Tide.  Alabama's the better team, but they've been emphasizing fundamentals over stats, and it's making a difference in the numerics.
• The Arizona Wildcats are quietly having a great season.  They've played a very respectable slate so far and are looking solid in the process  It's been so long since anybody cared about the Wildcats that we're not used to thinking of them, but there they are.  This is why I like numbers; I probably wouldn't give them the time of day if I was using my own intuition because I haven't heard a thing about them from the press wires.  I wonder if the human voters act the same way.
• The Florida Gator's Third Down Offense (3DO) has dropped like a stone.  Last week, their score was 1.586.  Now, they're 0.897.  For most of the season, they've been well above 2.  Since Tim Tebow's concussion, their third down conversion rate is nowhere near what it used to be.  I'm guessing that Meyer is still holding Tebow back for the moment in anticipation of Atlanta and the bowl game.  But he's rolling the dice.

Conference Rankings

Here are how the conferences stack up with a straight average of the teams:

The SEC is gaining a little more separation from the rest.  With few nonconference games left, this will probably hold.  The PAC-10 is a very solid second because (a) they have few bad teams, and (b) they have some surprisingly good teams, like Arizona, that the media chooses to completely ignore.  The rest of the BCS conferences are pick-ems, and the Mountain West suffers with several genuinely bad teams dragging down the efforts of TCU, BYU, Utah, and Air Force.  Don't get worked up about the 1-A independents; that's only Navy, Notre Dame, and Army, and Navy is the best of the three.  I just include them for completeness.

Let us not speak of the Sun Belt, ok?