If college football season is almost here, that must mean it’s BlogPoll time! For the seventh year, I am a BlogPoll voter, and I spent literally tens of minutes compiling my preseason top 25! Actually, I devote considerable effort to this enterprise during the regular season, but, at this stage of the game, your guess is as good as mine, so here are my guesses:
Dawg Sports Ballot - Week 1
Rank | Team | Delta |
---|---|---|
1 | Alabama Crimson Tide | -- |
2 | Oregon Ducks | -- |
3 | LSU Tigers | -- |
4 | Boise St. Broncos | -- |
5 | Oklahoma Sooners | -- |
6 | Stanford Cardinal | -- |
7 | Oklahoma St. Cowboys | -- |
8 | Michigan St. Spartans | -- |
9 | Virginia Tech Hokies | -- |
10 | South Carolina Gamecocks | -- |
11 | Wisconsin Badgers | -- |
12 | Texas A&M Aggies | -- |
13 | Florida St. Seminoles | -- |
14 | Nebraska Cornhuskers | -- |
15 | TCU Horned Frogs | -- |
16 | Arkansas Razorbacks | -- |
17 | Pittsburgh Panthers | -- |
18 | Mississippi St. Bulldogs | -- |
19 | Ohio St. Buckeyes | -- |
20 | Houston Cougars | -- |
21 | Penn St. Nittany Lions | -- |
22 | West Virginia Mountaineers | -- |
23 | Nevada Wolf Pack | -- |
24 | Florida Gators | -- |
25 | Southern Miss. Golden Eagles | -- |
SB Nation BlogPoll College Football Top 25 Rankings "
My explanations, for whatever they are worth, are offered after the jump:
- For the fourth straight year, I have awarded the No. 25 preseason ranking to Southern Miss, as a tip of the cap to my former SB Nation colleague, Matt Hinton, though, this year, Dr. Saturday concurs in my affirmation of his alma mater.
- As usual, there were not 25 teams worthy of being ranked in the top 25, and the gap separating the top five from the rest of the pack is huge. The teams I have ranked sixth through tenth are by no civilized measure deserving of top ten rankings, but they’re the dogs with the fewest fleas, relative to the rest of the pack.
- I believe Florida State and Oklahoma have been overrated by the pollsters generally, and I will need the Auburn Tigers, Georgia Bulldogs, Missouri Tigers, Notre Dame Fighting Irish, and USC Trojans to prove it on the field before I am prepared to rank any of them.
- For the first few weeks of the season, I likely will tweak my rankings only slightly, based upon a given week’s results, but, starting about three or four weeks in, I probably will start using a clean white sheet of paper at the outset of each week’s ballot. Once this process begins, your feedback is welcome. It’s welcome now, too, but, at the moment, all you really can offer in defense of your position is, "I’m a better guesser than you!" You very well may be, but there’s no way to know now about which guesses you will lurch uncontrollably into accuracy.
- That said, these are the teams I think will be good, in the approximate order in which I think their quality will manifest itself in wins and losses, but I will be wrong about a lot of that.
Those wishing to say, "I told you so!" later may tell me so now in the comments.
Go ‘Dawgs!