Monday, September 15, 2008

i haven't died

Just so you know. But I have perhaps gone crazy? And as proof of both, I offer my Blogpoll rankings for the week:


RankTeamDelta
1East Carolina 10
2Southern Cal--
3Oklahoma 2
4Missouri 2
5South Florida 20
6Alabama 11
7Penn State 15
8Georgia 5
9Florida 5
10Texas 3
11Nebraska 15
12Oregon 4
13Oklahoma State 13
14Wisconsin 4
15LSU 6
16Utah 10
17Brigham Young 4
18Kansas 6
19Ohio State 18
20Auburn 5
21Virginia Tech 3
22Texas Tech 8
23Wake Forest 4
24Clemson 3
25Vanderbilt 1



Dropped Out: Arizona State (#8), West Virginia (#20), Illinois (#23), Fresno State (#24).

Explain yourself, dude. OK. This week I shift hard over to resume voting, with some biases included.

Example of said bias: Team A has done the following:
- Stomped a I-AA tin can.
- Narrowly beaten Ohio.
- Got stomped by a team considered to be elite.

Team A sure looks like Ohio State, but Central Michigan has the exact same resume. OSU is on the ballot because they're still a good team. CMU still needs to earn themselves something. One purely resume alone, I'd probably include a couple of teams and give the Buckeyes the boot entirely.

This should not be taken as predictive at all. I do not think South Florida or ECU would beat most of those teams below them. But USF has a win over a team I ranked, and ECU has those nice shiny upsets to start the season.

Credit is given for woodshedding three bad teams. Penn State, for example. The thought is that good teams are supposed to kick the ass of bad ones - if you do this three straight times, you are probably a good team. For example again, Illinois has been on this ballot three times in a row and is now gone. Losing by 10 to Missouri is forgivable; combining it with a nailbiter win over a lousy ULL team is not.

There is one major problem with resume voting so early, and I am dealing with it by pointing it out to you and then ignoring it. The example is USC. They have stomped two teams with lousy resumes, one of which actually is terrible. This should put them much lower than they are, but clearly, beating Ohio State was a landmark win and deserving of much credit. Thus, a paradox: utterly stomping a good team makes them look really bad and thus appears to lower your own resume. This goes away later in the season. But meantime, I give USC high marks for beating a good team and also put that good team quite low in the rankings as punishment for getting beaten so badly. (Partly. The Bobcats played a big role in that too. If that game had been 42-10 like it should have, OSU would be at least 10 spots higher.)

Anyway, as always, feel free to stamp out any stupidity on my part before it becomes official. Keep in mind the criteria though. What I'm looking (hoping) for is people to point out inconsistencies in my own method and results, not try to rerank based on their own.

No comments: