Just to back up the skin-of-the-teeth nature of the series I did last month on the mythical championship contenders, Stassen.com's preliminary preseason consensus makes a great case for compromise:

The Buckeyes' hold on the top spot holds up even if you include some of the earlier top 25 polls from mainstream sites on the Web, though those ballots were much more likely to settle on Georgia as No. 1 than the magazines are, and the Cocktail Party winner is the favorite in general. Either way, it seems everybody's expecting three winner-take-all Armageddon games: Ohio State-USC, Georgia-Florida and Oklahoma-Missouri in the Big 12 Championship, which must be an unprecedented triptych of cataclysmic showdowns for a single season. This regular season really does look like a playoff, if not for, uh, all those other games getting in the way. 

But if the favorites hold serve, oh, the drama! The bitching! Would that we could only hope...