This week’s sad mess is brought to you courtesy of our sponsor, the city of Jacksonville, who is happy to sponsor the “Sideline Safety Zone” for students who feel even the eeninesiest bit unsafe at any point in Saturday’s proceedings. Their appeal to the drunk, underage student is something for us all to remember:

Will I be arrested if I show up drunk?

The Zone is about helping people, not punishing people. Students who request assistance at the Zone for themselves or their friends will not be subject to legal action on alcohol issues.

If only our HR manual said the same thing. Our ballot follows. It is, as always, a fiasco wrapped in a blueberry pancake deep-fried in the rich, boiling oil of delusional guesswork served in a commemorative tote bag of speculation.

The ballot:

Rank Team Delta
1 Ohio State —
2 Southern Cal —
3 Michigan —
4 Tennessee —
5 Texas —
6 Louisville —
7 California —
8 Clemson —
9 Auburn —
10 Florida —
11 West Virginia —
12 Notre Dame —
13 Wisconsin —
14 Boston College 3
15 Georgia Tech 1
16 Arkansas 2
17 Rutgers 1
18 Texas A&M 2
19 Nebraska —
20 Missouri 1
21 Wake Forest 1
22 Boise State 2
23 Pittsburgh 2
24 Oregon 9
25 Oklahoma 2

Dropped Out:

Remember, we’re trying to do relational polling based on our best estimates of absolute value. Meaning: we use the evidence we’ve got and plot it out just a few fathoms out before recalibrating the next week. Polling is like navigation without a compass; either you intuit your way across the water and just admit it a la Polynesian navigation, or you stay close to the shore, tack, and write “THERE BE DRAGONS” on the unknowns. Like any voter should, we’ll just admit where the dragons are on our map. Our biggest one is currently in the number two slot.

The ancien regime sees no beheadings this week. Stasis rules, mostly because we get little data forcing wiggles in the top ranks. Tennessee/Bama was close, yes, but it usually is. Cal gets screwed by a freak Hail Mary that would have sunk lesser teams, but recovers like Nobel Prize winners do. Everyone else coasts or sleepwalks through their games.

Auburn bumps, Clemson trumps. Clemson flattened Tech. Just paved them. The amount of talent they have in the backfield and the fact that Gaines Adams was a one man force multiplier caving in the Tech line on defense culminated in a fourth quarter of truly Gailey-esque futility. Right now they’d beat Auburn or Florida, and mostly on account of the very simple and effective ways they work two backfield demons into the gameplan at once. To compare their overall team profile to Auburn ‘04 would not be a stretch at this point.

Charlie can’t run. Notre Dame can’t run. We saw it in person. On television it’s easy to be dazzled by the skill play of QuinnmarxdkijaMcKnight, but whenever ND’s faced a competent d-line and a decent pass defense they’ve plotzed around in a muddle of bad blocking and ineffectual running, just as we saw them do in South Bend on Saturday. The line’s not nimble enough to execute the draw-and-toss game Weis loves to throw out there in the second half, and the first good D that rolls up with a good offense will beat them. We’re willing to edge just that far away from the shore based on what we saw and hope we don’t sail off the edge of the speculative horizon.

West Virginia goes back up. Mostly on the muddled performances or bye weeks of those around them. Our couch flameth, our couch dimmeth by the week with them.

Confessed Error One: Arkansas moves up strictly out of sloppiness. They should be down three or four spots. We blame society and our jittery caffeine Parkinson’s for that. Possibly corrected under the wire.

Confessed Error Two: Oregon. They shouldn’t even be close to where they are. Possibly corrected under the wire

Boston College. A very balanced, respectable, and altogether considerate New Englanderish type bunch who win with the professionalism of a Harvard Business School grad. They read their case studies, they implement well…they’re change agents and proactive solution-makers, dammit. We hire them for the week until we find the phantom bank accounts for “snacks” taken out in the company name at the Bank of Nauru.


Nauru: ready for your ill-gotten funds when you are.

Other notes:

–Nebraska’s a noble gas in our poll: nothing moves them up, and nothing moves them down. They just sit there, inert and bored. We’ll drop them next week for simply being boring. We drop LSU, which we have no problem doing since the Les Miles Cult of Personality has officially died. (Blame huge, cumbersome white hat.)

–Oklahoma and Pitt are underwhelming and a bit flat, the Mr. Pibbs of the CFB world. Oklahoma may blame cruel fate; Pitt may blame the mustache-shaped alien that pilots the lifeform we call Dave Wannstedt.

–Rutgers fever: go ahead and catch it. Think of it like volunteering to be someone’s prison love slave rather than waiting to be approached, since ESPN’s cell block bully’s going to be ramming it in your innards in a few weeks anyway. You may as well control the sodomy before it happens.