Friday, September 28, 2007

Dear Fellow BlogPollers

Stop lying to yourselves.

Come over to the dark side of resume ranking.

West Virginia had no business being ranked in the top 5. Or top 10. Or top 20. They simply didn’t have a single credible win to their record.

But you ranked them 5th.

You bought the lie. The Worldwide Leader had electrodes linked straight to your brain.

Not the resume rankers. Take a look:

Sunday Morning Quarterback and DawgSports put West Virginia 9th. We at Saurian Sagacity had them 12th.

Which was one spot behind South Florida.

West Virginia? Unranked in our poll next week. If you rank them, you simply aren’t watching college football.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

They lost a sloppy game on the road by one score to a team with a nasty defense. Oh yeah, West Virginia also lost its starting quarterback part way into it too. It's not unreasonable to keep WVU ranked.

I know you're not doing a strict resume rank by the simple fact that Florida is in the top 5, and Tennessee (a team with no offensive identity and no defense at all) is the best team the Gators have played so far. Why did Cincinnati move up despite the fact its feature win over Oregon State got devalued last weekend? Why is Oregon #6 when it has yet to beat a team with a winning record as of the time of your ballot?

I'm not trying to be mean-spirited, nor am I advocating a 2005 Notre Dame-ian logic of WVU looking better because of a loss. I'm just saying it's not so cut-and-dried that the Mountaineers should fall. If you had them ranked in the first place then you weren't doing a pure resume rank anyway, so why try to cause a scene by encouraging others to delist them entirely?

Anonymous said...

And by fall in the third paragraph, I meant fall out of the poll entirely. WVU definitely should fall in the polls to some degree.

Mergz said...

Year2 - I'm guilty of drunk blogging in this post.

Literally.

You see, I was/am in Gainesville getting in advance of the Auburn game. If you note the post time, I was well in my cups, having just won a money-line bet on USF over WVU that paid +240.

I'm probably going to rank WVU. However, it will be pretty damn high up. When I rank, I look first for the significant win or wins a team has. In WVU's case, their best win is over 2-2 Maryland. Not a sterling line item.

After I list the undefeated teams by merit of their wins, I go to the 1 loss teams and look at their losses and wins. For WVU, they will have that single loss to what will be a pretty highly ranked team. So, they will probably end up in the rankings somewhere.

However, their was a decent point to my inebriated posting. WVU was terribly overranked by everyone involved (AP, USA Today, BlogPoll) at 5th. The ranking was being made on the mere promise of White/Slayton et al. They don't get a pass in my book becayse if a "sloppy game" or they were against a "nasty" defense.

Which will apply to my Gators, too, when they play at LSU.

Also, at this point, USF looks to have a better resume than my own Gators. They may end up top 5 in my poll.

So, WVU will be ranked. Probably. And maybe I will lock up my key board next time I am drinking.

Nah, why bother.

Anonymous said...

Sure USF won, but it was a SLOPPY game on both sides of the ball. For all intents nad purposes that USF-WVA game should have been called The Turnover Bowl.