National Championships Ahoy! plus AP Voter Redux

A couple notes on the season's final rankings:

• Florida blog Saurian Sagacity, to its credit after UF's overwhelming mythical title victory, effectively contends in accord with its previously stated position on the inherently unofficial, subjective nature of any national championship that its Gators are a national champion, as rated by the Bowl Championship Series and its corporate partners, the Associated Press, the Blog Poll and dozens of other "selectors," rather than the national champion. To wit: Harry Devold's 62nd annual ratings name Ohio State number one, and Jeff Sagarin's final "predictor" formula (far right column; these apparently quantify what SMQ has taken to calling the "essence" of a team as you expect it to perform, as opposed to the BCS-mandated "ELO_CHESS" and Sagarin's prefered "original" formula based on actual results) lists Southern Cal as its top team for 2006. A very interesting set of ratings (culled from this comparison of dozens) by someone named "Pickle" favors Louisville while dropping Florida all the way to sixteenth. From the same list, something called "GridMap" (no site SMQ can find) picked Boise State.

Congratulations, Ohio State, Boise State, Louisville and USC! By one calculation or another, SC can now claim an unprecedented four consecutive national championships; if the Trojans' 2003 AP championship is to be recognized as a legitimate component of a split "national championship" along with the winner of the opinion poll-determined BCS mythical championship game - which SMQ and, he thinks, most fans outside Louisiana readily recognize - it and every other champion of any poll has every basis and right to hoist its banners and prepare its media guide mock-ups. The championships for Boise State and Louisville are the first for both schools, which SMQ is hardly in any position to deny simply because he happens to very strongly disagree with Pickle's opinion/method. That's a more legitimate championship claim than any based on polls awarded to teams with bowl games still to play.

Click here for still more rankings of equal validity.

Brian Brohm to return in '07 to defend Louisville's first ever Pickle National Championship.
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• Elsewhere, we have Paul Kislanko's breakdown of the voting in the season's final AP poll by position:

Eighteen teams appeared on every voter's ballot; 26 made a majority of ballots. But only 33 teams received at least one vote, including, for some reason, San Jose State, whose impressing dimantling of New Mexico induced a sentimental voter to drop the Spartans in his or her final position. Boise State got the only first place vote that didn't go to Florida (check every ballot here if you'd like to know specificially which voter's individual championship went to the Broncos), but BSU was one of four teams that got second-place votes, highlighting the total and understandable lack of agreement over that position. Interesting to note the jumble in positions 3-9, in which no team topped out at #3 (that is, every team that got at least one third place vote also got at least one second place vote) or #6, only two teams - Auburn and Wisconsin - topped at #4 and only Michigan at #5. Nobody had much of an idea what to do with Arkansas, BYU, Wake Forest or TCU, whose votes wound up scattered somewhat evenly over more than a dozen positions apiece. Several voters liked the Razorbacks and Cougars, along with Cal, more than Texas, but there was ultimately less disagreement about the Longhorns, who benefit from the indecision immediately below them.