BlogPoll Ballot - Season Week 7
As suspected, this wasn't easy to come up with -
| Rank | Team | Delta |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | South Florida |  4 |
| 2 | Ohio State | -- |
| 3 | Arizona State | 3 |
| 4 | Oklahoma | 14 |
| 5 | Boston College | 2 |
| 6 | LSU |  5 |
| 7 | South Carolina | 3 |
| 8 | Kentucky | 7 |
| 9 | West Virginia | 7 |
| 10 | Oregon | 1 |
| 11 | Kansas | 2 |
| 12 | Virginia Tech | 5 |
| 13 | Missouri | 9 |
| 14 | California | 11 |
| 15 | Texas Tech | 11 |
| 16 | Hawaii | 3 |
| 17 | Cincinnati | 9 |
| 18 | Virginia | 6 |
| 19 | Florida | 7 |
| 20 | Penn State | 6 |
| 21 | Connecticut | 7 |
| 22 | Kansas State | 4 |
| 23 | Auburn | 3 |
| 24 | Boise State | 2 |
| 25 | Southern Cal | -- |
Dropped Out: Illinois (#12), Purdue (#19), Wisconsin (#20), Indiana (#21), Florida State (#22), Texas A&M (#23).
Hovering Nearby (no particular order) - Michigan, Illinois, Wake Forest, Clemson, FSU
A few quick comments -
USF – Ohio State was a very tough call. In the end, simply no other undefeated team in the nation has 2 better wins than South Florida – at Auburn and over West Virginia. Ohio State’s biggest win is over two loss Purdue.
Arizona State is underappreciated. 13th nationally in scoring offense, 18th in total defense, 8th in scoring defense. They give up 15 ppg defensively in the Pac Ten, which is a number near championship defenses of the past. This is a Pac Ten team that actually plays defense! With the controversial Dennis Erickson at the helm, this team might just be for real.
I’ll have more later. Comments kindly solicited.
Mentioned in Austin Murphy's book 
8 comments:
Mergz,
You really think Uconn should be that high? Their wins are very low quality; I assumed the loss against a pedestrian Virginia team was enough to show they were highly overranked.
Cliff
Florida at 19? Behind Virginia (which managed to beat Middle Tennessee by 2 points, and got pasted by Wyoming)?
Some of the logic behind placements on your poll confuses me, but I'd say the same about any poll these days. At least the general principal seems sound!
Why is Kentucky ranked behind LSU if you use a resume based blogpoll?
-Shlomo
Cliff - I don't think UConn is a very good team, but that one loss is to a decent UVA team (and was by 1 point at that). You will note also that UConn is the 2nd worst ranked 1 loss team. USC is worse, and a loss to Stanford is without a doubt worse than UVA.
Anon- I have UF my top ranked 2 loss team. Our two losses are the best 2 losses out there - but they are still 2 losses.
Jason - I haven't seen a poll all year that - in retospect - looks worth a shit.
Shlomo - I wrote elsewhere that the UK-South Car-LSU quandry was going to be tough (they all beat one of the others). In the end, I decided LSU had the best loss among the group - OT on the road. South Carolina's loss was second best - to LSU at Death Valley. And UK's loss to South Carolina was the worst of the lot. I guess I could have gone the other way - which was the best wins, but to get out of the whole circular logic of it, I had to go somewhere.
Thanks for the comments all.
Mergz does the BlogPoll ballot but I can only assume that LSU's loss to Kentucky is not as "bad" a loss as Kentucky's loss to South Carolina. Also I suspect the fact that LSU has two quality wins (Florida and South Carolina) vs. Kentucky's one over LSU had something to do with it. I would assume that the resume does not end with a head to head win but must be judged in its entirety.
Why any of the three one-loss SEC teams behind Oklahoma? Not one has a loss as bad as Colorado, each has a win over a team more highly-ranked than OU's best (Mizzou), and LSU and SC also have a second win (UF for LSU, UGA for SC) that's just as good as OU's (Texas).
One of the reasons I decided to show my ballot early this week was college football has been thrown into such "disarray" due to upsets.
I think Jerry makes an excellent point - the SEC teams probably should be ahead of Oklahoma.
I also might move UConn down a notch or two, as well as Boise after their near death experience on the blue field last night.
Post a Comment