Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Week Ten BlogPoll

RankTeamDelta
1 Ohio State 25
2 Michigan 24
3 Texas 23
4 California 22
5 Auburn 21
6 Florida 20
7 Tennessee 19
8 Southern Cal 18
9 Arkansas 17
10 Notre Dame 16
11 West Virginia 15
12 Louisville 14
13 LSU 13
14 Rutgers 12
15 Boston College 11
16 Wisconsin 10
17 Clemson 9
18 Boise State 8
19 Oklahoma 7
20 Virginia Tech 6
21 Oregon 5
22 Texas A&M 4
23 Wake Forest 3
24 Georgia Tech 2
25 Missouri 1

Dropped Out:

As always, let me know rather quickly if I made any serious errors, and I will correct them.

Ignore the delta numbers on the right, obviously. I missed last week's BlogPoll, which annoys me, but afforded me the opportunity to start over, which I sort of took. Some thoughts, by conference:

Big Ten
The Buckeyes still look like the class of the conference. Tops in the conference in scoring offense and scoring defense, with a defense that's improving every week. My biggest concern about the team is that they are probably being challenged more during practice than they are during gameday. That should change come November 18th, and I hope they're ready for it.

Just a note to those arguing that Michigan hasn't been as impressive as a #2 team should be: true, but that's no indication of the quality of the team. Just keep in mind, the 2002 Buckeyes seldom looked all that impressive, and look what they accomplished. Maybe (hopefully) Ohio State will blow them off the field in a few weeks, but I doubt it.

I'm not sold on Wisconsin. The offense is one-dimensional, and the defense is decent, but nothing special. If they beat Penn State, I'll reconsider.

Speaking of Penn State, I considered ranking them, again. I talked myself out of it, but their three losses came to my first, second, and tenth teams. There are 15 ranked teams that I would expect to do the same, with that schedule.

Big East
Am I giving no respect to the Big East? Absolutely. WVU's best win is Maryland, Louisville's is Miami, and Rutgers' is probably Navy. These are not good teams. If those three teams beat up on each other and everyone loses, I don't see myself ranking any of them above 15. It'll take one of the teams blowing the other two out of the water for me to consider them a top five team.

SEC
I don't really think all those teams are that good. That's not to say that it's a bad conference, just that I think they probably only have 2 or 3 legit top-10 teams. I just don't know the good teams from the bad at this point, so I threw them all in a jumble in the hopes that they'll sort things out. I tried to give Arkansas some respect, since just about the only reason they aren't as highly ranked as the other SEC teams in the rest of the polls is that they started the season unranked.

Big 12
It's Texas and Oklahoma again. Awesome. I am so excited.

Texas A&M keeps winning, but seldom impressively. I'll have to give them some real respect if they handle Oklahoma Saturday.

I liked Missouri and Chase Daniels, but I would appreciate it if they stopped sucking.

ACC
Thanks a lot, Clemson. I bought into you, then you lost to BC and I decided you were the same old Clemson team, then you were really good again, and I decided you were legit, and you got stomped by Virginia Tech. Same old Clemson. I don't care what else happens this season. You're dead to me (in other words, stay the hell out of my top ten).

Virginia Tech's sort of a usual suspect in top 25's around the world, though I'm not sure they're that good. Beating a top ten team gets you into my top 25, but I don't know if that's because Tech's capable of being that good, or if (more likely) I just overrated Clemson.

I don't know what sort of events have transpired that have led to a Wake Forest team missing it's starting QB and RB going 7-1, but I think they may eventually lead to the end of the world.

And I have no idea how good Georgia Tech is. None. They baffle me.

Pac 10
USC lost, which made me happy, since I don't especially like USC. I don't think that means they're bad, though. There's still a ton of talent on that team. I think Cal's the more complete team, though. Other than that, I don't really have much of an opinion on the West Coasters, other than I'm looking forward to watching USC's last four games of the season: Oregon, Cal, Notre Dame, UCLA. Good times.

Everyone Else
If I'd thought it would piss off Charlie Weis in any way, shape, or form, I'd have dropped Notre Dame out of my top 25. How can a guy be such a jackass when there's cameras and reporters around, but such an (apparently) nice guy to people when he's away from a podium? Shouldn't famous people be nice on camera, and jerks to the individual fans, not the other way around?

As for Boise State, meh. There, I said it.

2 comments:

WhiteDawg said...

Please don't compare Michigan to the 2002 OSU team. They haven't won anything yet.

Sean said...

All they've won is every game they played in. Is that anywhere near as significant as what the 2002 Buckeyes achieved? No. Those Buckeyes beat better competition than this year's Michigan team has played. But comparisons can be drawn. They're both teams with excellent defenses that let teams hang around longer than they probably should, but still manage to win.

All I'm saying is that any Ohio State fan who says Michigan isn't worthy of their ranking because they haven't been blowing teams out is doing the same thing we were bitching about during the national championship run.