Your first in-season doses of WBE’s BlogPoll and SEC Power Poll ballots, comin atcha:
War Blog Eagle Ballot – Week 2
| Rank | Team | Delta |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Boise St. Broncos |  4 |
| 2 | TCU Horned Frogs | — |
| 3 | Alabama Crimson Tide | — |
| 4 | Oregon Ducks | — |
| 5 | Wisconsin Badgers | 1 |
| 6 | Ohio St. Buckeyes | 1 |
| 7 | Nebraska Cornhuskers | 2 |
| 8 | Oklahoma Sooners |  -7 |
| 9 | Texas Longhorns | 1 |
| 10 | Florida Gators | -2 |
| 11 | Notre Dame Fighting Irish | 2 |
| 12 | Georgia Bulldogs | -1 |
| 13 | Miami Hurricanes | 1 |
| 14 | Utah Utes | — |
| 15 | Michigan Wolverines | — |
| 16 | Arizona Wildcats | 6 |
| 17 | BYU Cougars | — |
| 18 | LSU Tigers | — |
| 19 | South Carolina Gamecocks | — |
| 20 | Auburn Tigers | -5 |
| 21 | Arkansas Razorbacks | -1 |
| 22 | Houston Cougars | -6 |
| 23 | Iowa Hawkeyes | -5 |
| 24 | Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets | -5 |
| 25 | Virginia Tech Hokies | -13 |
| Dropouts: Connecticut Huskies, Boston College Eagles, Pittsburgh Panthers, North Carolina Tar Heels, USC Trojans | ||
SB Nation BlogPoll College Football Top 25 Rankings ยป
I know that is one truly bizarre-looking ballot, so let me explain: once the season begins, I do my best to rank teams based on what they’ve done on the field … up to a certain extent. The extent where, say, you put LSU ahead of Ohio State because LSU beat an ACC team (however gutted) and Ohio St. beat Marshall. So what I do this early in the year, basically, is divide teams into tiers, then rank within that tier according to who they beat (and how impressively) in Week 1.
Usually, there’s a couple of teams in a very top tier that I keep perched at 1, 2, or 3 regardless of who they played. But in a year this wide open, the top tier includes every team between 1 and 10 (though Texas and Florida maybe should have been evicted). Boise nabbed the best win of those 10 teams, beating what might be the eventual ACC champion in what was essentially a road game, so they’re at No. 1. TCU was at home but beat a potential top-25-quality Pac-10 team, so they’re No. 2. And so on.
As for the rest of the poll …
11-13: Tier 2. Notre Dame was the only one of the three to play a real team, so they go at the top.
14-19: Each of these teams either played actual competition or–in the unique case of Arizona–played their cupcake on the road, cross-country, and still absolutely slaughtered them. Utah-Michigan-BYU-LSU are ranked in order of strength of opponent and quality of performance. Carolina brings up the rear of this tier, having played “only” an upper-tier mid-major at home, but beating them in very impressive fashion.
20-24: Teams we learned little-to-nothing about, but who are still too good to leave off the ballot entirely. Auburn stays at the front of this pack by virtue of playing D-I competition.
25: Virginia Tech hasn’t accomplished anything just yet, but again, they’re so much better than the teams on the other side of the velvet rope I think they deserve to hang in at No. 25.
Waitlist: Teams like Kentucky, Fresno St., Maryland, Northwestern, and Kansas St. that beat other BCS-level teams but still have a too few many doubts about them to break into the top 25.
Now onto the …
1. Alabama. Assuming Ingram is back for the trip to Fayetteville and the Tide D makes the expected mincemeat out of PSU’s frosh QB, the biggest story of ‘Bama’s early season is going to be how much of a non-story their big stories are.
2. Georgia. At least one hypothetical SEC East contender looked the part in Week 1. (OK, so two did if you count the ‘Cocks. But you get the point. The Dawgs did what the Gators couldn’t.)
3. Florida. It’s flat impossible Meyer allows the offense to look so eye-gougingly horrific again. But clearly the offseason hasn’t done a thing to solve the Gators’ inability to throw further than 4 yards downfield.
4. South Carolina. We’ve replaced this customer’s usual South Carolina Week 1 snoozefest with new Gamecock crystals. Let’s see if they notice. CUSTOMER: Waiter, this team is terrific! WAITER: Sir, did you know you’re watching the Gamecocks? CUSTOMER: Oh. So it won’t taste like this again next week then, huh?
5. LSU. One day a vast underdog to LSU will finally stop their punt return game, and LSU will lose and lose painfully, and everyone will be embarrassed. But until that day, they’ve beaten a quality BCS-conference foe, and the following teams (save Kentucky) haven’t.
6. Auburn. The Arkansas St. game featured a ridiculous total of 31 possessions, despite the fact the clock-killed fourth quarter only included four. (By contrast, Michigan-UConn only featured 18.) Hope that defensive depth we’ve been promised–and didn’t exactly see vs. the Red Wolves–comes through.
7. Arkansas. We already knew the Hogs could look juggernautical against the kinds of teams that are as far away from juggernaut status as possible. But at least we’ll learn just as much next week when they take on ULM. Or not.
8. Mississippi State. Great. What the rest of the conference really wanted Dan Mullen to have was an accurate quarterback as well as one that could bull over people. I’m thrilled for him. Really.
9. Kentucky. ‘Cats should probably get more credit for racking up 430-plus yards against a Charlie Strong defense and beating a Big East team on the road. But beating Louisville the last couple of years still didn’t get them past 3 SEC wins, so we’ll see.
10. Tennessee. Hey, so Dooley’s bunch can pound the tar out of tomato cans. Good for him. So could Lane Kiffin’s.
11. Vanderbilt. ‘Dores were much more competitive than I expected against Northwestern; maybe they’re due for several more soul-shreddingly painful losses than the experts think, huh? (Wait, what, WINS? Don’t be silly.)
12. Ole Miss. Manufacturing your own quarterback controversy out of thin air isn’t just asking for trouble, it’s offering trouble its own trailer and 20 percent of the gate.
This week’s final SECPP results are available at TeamSpeedKills, as always.
Hmmm, I like to read all of your blogs, I check daily. However, I am not a big fan of this poll. If you really rank the teams based upon how good you think they are, then you should rank UNC 2nd team as “dropout”, and UNC 1st team would be in the “good, but we don’t know much about them” category. I don’t know that you should fall into the trap of creating a poll this early in the season just because other sources do so with absolutely nothing to base their rankings off of. It will create a bias for your polls for the rest of the season, that no matter how hard you try to fight, will be present one way or another.
Maybe, Nathan, but–not to sound like an arrogant tool–I think years of resume-studying both for NCAA tourney bracketology purposes and Blogpoll purposes has me pretty well trained to start from scratch each week as soon as we have enough data–week 4 or 5–to come up with a ballot that makes sense based on resume alone. I think I tend to be aware of my biases and account for them fairly well. But if you see something out of place in a few weeks, I’m certainly not immune to criticism.
As for creating a ballot at all this early, I 100 percent agree that both the AP and Coaches’ polls should not. They should both wait until October. But since the Blog Poll is, technically, just for fun, I don’t have a problem with it here.
It’s cool. I only post negatives anyways, and I’ve never posted before, which means I love the blog. I have just hated polls since I was a freshman at Auburn in 2004…
No sweat, Nathan, and Lord knows that Auburn fans who lived through 2004 have the best possible reason to be distrustful of polls. Glad you like the site.
Jerry,
I totally support your poll logic if you are willing to drop BSU later in the year when they are beating up on the WAC and other great teams are slogging (word?) through BCS competition week in week out. The evil of polls is not how early they are conducted, but how inflexible the voters are. The complete lack of thought that goes into the logic “team A can’t pass team B in the rankings because I thought team B was better before the season started” leads me to believe that Craig James’ intellect and Mel Kiper’s pomposity are common among poll voters.
Thank you Jerry for providing more thoughtful content.
Gas, I’m vehemently against the kind of knee-jerk logic that says that Boise should never play in the national title game because of their schedule–between convincing Oregon St. to come to the blue turf and visiting Tech, they’re doing the best they can, and I don’t see any reason they couldn’t beat this year’s Alabama or Ohio St. or whoever–but unless both Tech and Oregon St. win their respective conferences and/or Boise utterly destroys the WAC in a manner befitting a top-two team (yes, margin-of-victory matters here), I have an awfully hard time seeing myself rank them ahead of a one-loss SEC/Pac-10/BigTen/ACC champion at the end of the year. (The Big 12 and Big East I might make an exception for, depending on the exception.)