SMQ tediously slaved into the wee hours over highly advanced spreadsheet technology that attempted to rank every game played this season by the 35 teams considered for this week's poll, from 1-259, and take an average of each team's collective ranks. The results were a) late, leading to the hastily thrown-together effort you see below, before SMQ could even calculate how b) hideously deformed his work would emerge. Ongoing failure and dementia on front is not a broken record or misguided comedy bit; SMQ is just stupid.
He refuses, though, to believe game-by-game rankings are worthless, and these results were interesting - at least in the sense that it is interesting to produce rankings that place Arkansas behind Alabama and out of the top 25 altogether, Washington State ahead of West Virginia and Ohio State at number four, one spot behind Florida. SMQ has the spreadsheet if anyone would like him to e-mail this method, and possibly offer some criticism on how to better "rank" games played. Remember that this is only for loose guiding purposes and not to be a hard, fast, inviolable formula closed to interpretation. SMQ, for his part, will remember the assurance derived last week from much less stringent and more utilitarian comparisons.
One day, SMQ's rankings monster will live
Anyway, as far as slapdash ballots go, this is a good week, because no changes are necessary among the top dozen or so. Clemson leapt West Virginia and Louisville, for obvious reasons, and Rutgers sits right behind its conference brethren, forcing SMQ to wonder why, exactly, he deems the Knights' resume to be slightly less than those of its more lauded peers. SMQ is not responsible for anything happening below Arkansas.
BlogPoll Ballot, Week Eight
1. Ohio State
2. Michigan
3. Southern Cal
4. Auburn
5. Florida
6. Tennessee
7. California
8. Notre Dame
9. Texas
10. Boston College
11. Clemson
12. Louisville
13. West Virginia
14. Rutgers
15. Arkansas
16. Wisconsin
17. Oklahoma
18. Texas A&M
19. LSU
20. Missouri
21. Nebraska
22. Wake Forest
23. Georgia Tech
24. BYU
25. Virginia Tech
No attempts to justify at the moment. 'Tis what 'tis.
Update [2006-10-25 12:24:12 by SMQ]: Oh god, forgot Boise State. Dammit. This is a day of shame. Imagine them at 18, and Virginia Tech gone. Never, ever pay attention to anything SMQ ever says again, ever.