BLOG POLLIN': WEEK SIX BALLOT

This week’s ballot is brought to you by Tom O’Brien, who would like to remind you that Boston College is one damn fine football team. Yessir.

Some of us need reminding, apparently – the ballot you see below includes the Eagles at number six, beneficiaries of last weekend’s carnage despite a middling win over UMass, but the early version here and the very officially official version submitted for this week’s poll stupidly left B.C. out. This happens sometimes to voters in mainstream polls, and we mock those voters relentlessly for their carelessness with matters of such vital importance. And we should. And we have to take as good as we give, so although I could petition for leniency in light of self-reporting, the only fair conclusion to be reached here is that my opinions are uninformed, invalid, sloppy and to be ignored. I’ve never used this site to call anyone an idiot or a douchebag, but for overlooking Boston College at the submission stage, I am both of those things.

Anyway, BC is sixth. Extend this and double it for overlooking Purdue this morning as well. The Boilermakers come in at 16. So, as much legitimate thought and comparison and cutting and pasting as actually went into this week’s ballot, it’s still a tepid mashup of incompetence and regret. I really did put a lot of thought into it. Just, I dunno, absentminded thought, I guess. This is really terrible.

Okay, caveats in the rearview, the justification:

LSU remains something of a no-brainer at one, though Cal makes a strong push with the added value of Oregon to its slate this week and the dillution of LSU’s unbridled awesomeness by Tulane. Between them, three of ten victims (Virginia Tech, South Carolina, Oregon) are undefeated otherwise, before Tennessee and Auburn-felling Mississippi State are even in the mix. South Florida moves in as the only other perfect team with a pair of indisputably high-value wins, though the Bulls’ offense makes them more vulnerable down the line against, say, Rutgers, or even Cincinnati, teams that haven’t given the ball away at anywhere near the rate Auburn and West Virginia did in their losses. That Rutgers and Cincinnati are the two toughest teams remaining on the schedule is an obstacle in itself; USF might be invisible over the next couple months while the rest of the top ten has a marquee game every other week.

USC, Kentucky, Boston College, Ohio State and Wisconsin are birds of a feather, along with Arizona State at ten, as all have decent wins but none has a really good win; aside from Wisconsin over Michigan State, the only trophy among the five that hasn’t lost somewhere else is Nebraska, and that’s only because Wake Forest’s first-time starter temporarily lost his mind in the red zone and Ball State’s kicker missed the game-winner. The best transitive property victory of the group is Oklahoma, via ASU victim Colorado, which is the only really good thing to say about the Devils’ schedule to this point.

I do retract what I said Tuesday about Wisconsin’s schedule: it is not inferior to Purdue’s, Arizona State’s or especially Cincinnati’s, the Bearcats’ marquee pelt being that of turnover machine Oregon State, also prey for the trophy rooms of ASU and UCLA. Reading those words back on Dave Heller’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel blog, they sound very wrong. Wisconsin has not been overly impressive, but not that many teams have a better resumé at the moment.

Very, very little difference over the next dozen or so one-loss teams, all of them conquerors of some quality outfit but also high-profile victims. The anomaly here is two-loss Auburn, which rocketed ahead not only on its upset in Gainesville but on the big wins by South Florida and Kansas State – both of those teams, in turn, benefit from Auburn’s salvage job.

The bottom falls out this week on scavengers Cincinnati and Kansas, who can’t get away with whipping the MAC anymore as the rest of the country moves on to serious competition. More on both later today.

Everything will change next week.