The Blogpoll Draft is up with the requisite notes and yelling.

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Texas
2	Florida
3	Alabama
4	Cincinnati	1
5	TCU	2
6	Boise State
7	Georgia Tech	2
8	Iowa	4
9	LSU	2
10	Oregon	2
11	Miami (Florida)	2
12	Pittsburgh	5
13	Ohio State	2
14	Houston	2
15	Arizona	9
16	Southern Cal	2
17	Oregon State
18	Virginia Tech	3
19	Penn State	9
20	Utah	4
21	Oklahoma State	1
22	Stanford
23	Wisconsin	4
24	Clemson
25	Brigham Young
Last week’s ballot

NOTES APOLOGIES ETC.

–For the nth time: never mind the deltas.

–No, we’re not going to rank Pitt that high, since putting them where we did already feels like doing the splits over a steak knife. They lost to NC State and will implode at any second oh you just watch YOU JUST WATCH. (weeps, doesn’t know what’s real anymore.)

–Iowa doesn’t deserve to fall that far, or maybe they do. Requesting input.

–Ditto for Oregon, who…well, we still aren’t really sure what happened to them, because saying “you got run tha fuck ovah” can’t really be considered any form of analysis whatsoever.

–Seriously, don’t mind the deltas.

The draft follows, along with notes. You’ll hate it, because it’s a poll, and how dare you [holy shit polling complaints are as tiresome compaint goes here.] For the eleven millionth time: due to editing during the draft and saving it, the arrows indicating change in position MAY NOT REFLECT CHANGES FROM LAST WEEK. Don’t let that stop you from complaining about HURR HOW DID YOU MOVE HOUSTON UP 11 TORCHES OUTRAGE GRRRR??!?!??! Never mind the deltas, in other words.

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Texas	1
2	Florida	1
3	Alabama	2
4	Iowa
5	Cincinnati
6	Boise State
7	TCU	1
8	Oregon	1
9	Georgia Tech	1
10	Penn State	1
11	LSU	1
12	Houston	11
13	Miami (Florida)
14	Southern Cal	5
15	Ohio State	4
16	Utah	1
17	Pittsburgh	3
18	Notre Dame	2
19	Wisconsin
20	Oklahoma State	7
21	Virginia Tech	6
22	Oklahoma
23	California
24	Arizona	3
25	Brigham Young
Last week’s ballot

Si, Tejas. They looked the best and played a team without Joe Cox playing quarterback, a team that has Zac Robinson, a real live boy unlike Richtetto’s albino puppet son. Upon losing in Jacksonville Cox was kidnapped by a cruel carnivale, and was forced to perform giddy little musical numbers to crowds of drunken peasants who delighted in his almost lifelike actions. Only late at night, sleeping in a small patch of moonlight on his cage floor, would he recall the kindness of his maker and father. In this version of the story, Coxocchio is eaten by a huge whale named Carlos Dunlap, and suffocates in his belly.

So, yeah. The quality opponent makes a difference here, and they could flip-flop just as easily over the next few weeks.

Boise still over Oregon. Were it not for the head-to-head, we’d have Oregon over them after the Dishumilarassment of USC this weekend, but that’s all we have to go on: what actually happened on the field. The rest is just guesswork based on perceived goodness and the assumption that Iowa has a cornfield of cult-children casting powerful runes to protect their every play this season. Hezekiah, a fifth interception! Fetch the young schoolchild! Their innocent blood will guide Stanzi’s hand in victory. Enoch! More nachos!

The rest: Bloody mess. Get to the bottom and do your own 18-25 and find sheer arbitrary shuffling in every direction. HOW COULD YOU because after a certain threshold in the mid-teens they are all the same team: error-prone, saddled with two losses, and deciding internally between a bowl game named after an insurance, financial services, or tech company or one named after a household product or truck stop.

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Alabama
2	Texas	1
3	Florida	1
4	Iowa
5	Cincinnati
6	TCU	3
7	Boise State	1
8	Oregon	1
9	Southern Cal	1
10	LSU	5
11	Pittsburgh	3
12	Georgia Tech	1
13	Penn State	1
14	Oklahoma State	3
15	Notre Dame	2
16	West Virginia	7
17	Virginia Tech	1
18	Utah	2
19	South Carolina
20	Ohio State	1
21	Clemson
22	Arizona
23	Miami (Florida)	13
24	Houston	8
25	Brigham Young	3
Last week’s ballot

The draft is as always, merely drafty. Comments and statements of outright disgust should go below.

Rank	Team
1	Alabama
2	Florida
3	Texas
4	Iowa
5	Cincinnati
6	Boise State
7	Oregon
8	Southern Cal
9	TCU
10	Miami (Florida)
11	Georgia Tech
12	Penn State
13	Notre Dame
14	Pittsburgh
15	LSU
16	Houston
17	Oklahoma State
18	Virginia Tech
19	Ohio State
20	Utah
21	South Florida
22	Brigham Young
23	West Virginia
24	Texas Tech
25	Wisconsin

–First draft, and still mostly a mess.

–Whither Penn State, whose only real game came against a team that beat them by assembling spare points left over by the 1994 Penn State team while their defense and special teams saved the day?

–What of Iowa, who is either the grim subway groper waiting to molest the season in rush hour crowd, or the lurking Big Ten Team of Disappointment waiting to happen?

–Miami is above Virginia Tech, who we now have to assume just caught the ‘Canes on a day when they did not have Jacory Harris’s magical Louis Vuitton scarf in hand.

–The Mountain West teams not named TCU just sprinkle themselves somewhere between 16-25 week to week like cake decorations. Ooh, let’s dust some BYU on there!

–Just a draft. Add comments, outrage, etc.

Notes follow. We blame reality.

Rank	Team
1	Alabama
2	Florida
3	Texas
4	Houston
5	Boise State
6	Ohio State
7	Virginia Tech
8	Oregon
9	Cincinnati
10	Iowa
11	Oklahoma
12	Southern Cal
13	Miami (Florida)
14	Oklahoma State
15	Penn State
16	California
17	TCU
18	LSU
19	UCLA
20	Auburn
21	Kansas
22	Georgia
23	South Carolina
24	Mississippi
25	Minnesota

This was so much easier before people actually knew shit. Before you say a word: this is wacky, week-to-week voting with a hint of correction for perceived talent level, potential, and past performance. You know who’s not going to stick around most likely? Houston, Boise, and Oregon, because Houston and Boise will be dragged down by the mediocre competition they play, and because Oregon will follow up a carpet-bombing of Cal by having their star corner get de-kneed and blowing an easy Pac-10 game. Re: Oregon? You play one highly ranked team and lose on the road and then dishumilatinate the highest ranked team in your conference, you get perks. Re: Houston? Big 12 South wins should count just as much in September as they do in November, when the Big 12 gets their annual run in the polls off conference play. It’s a trick of the calendar at this point not to credit them.

The rest: Is a bloody mess. Where the hell do you put Iowa, other than above Penn State and below Ohio State, who would probably beat them in a 6-2 horror show leaving non-Big Ten fans holding their own eyeballs in hand at the end in order to ensure they could never watch such football horror ever again. USC is off the boards in terms of solid betting thanks to offensive woes, Miami and OK State are erratic, Penn State looked atrocious, there’s a knot of SEC teams at the bottom you can untangle if you’ve got three months of conference play, and GODDAMN THIS MADNESS.

Pretty sure Minnesota’s a rock-solid 25, though.

The Blogpoll draft for week three follows. It’s all still total guessing, but as long as you’re aware that it’s a street enchilada filled with mystery meat, dive in, please. Explanations and scantily reasoned justifications follow.

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Southern Cal	2
2	Alabama	1
3	Florida	1
4	Texas	2
5	Brigham Young
6	Penn State	3
7	Ohio State	7
8	Boise State	2
9	Oklahoma	3
10	California	2
11	Virginia Tech	8
12	Cincinnati	1
13	Houston
14	Mississippi	4
15	Miami (Florida)	1
16	Georgia Tech	2
17	TCU
18	Oklahoma State	11
19	LSU	4
20	Michigan
21	Utah	1
22	Notre Dame	5
23	Nebraska
24	Georgia
25	Missouri	14
Last week’s ballot

Endless coups. Number one should not be a static thing this early in the season, especially with our tiny but growing sample size. Going into Columbus and surviving in front of scarlet maelstrom (and a game OSU defense) gets USC the top spot, especially since they did so with a hobbled Taylor Mays and a freshman quarterback who could not feel his right shoulder for the third quarter. The degree separating them from Alabama in terms of absolute demonstrated value is marginal at best; we give USC the nod for playing a full road game, as opposed to the half-road game they played in a split crowd in ATL.

Florida bumps up for digesting Troy properly, a tougher game offensively than one might think as Troy’s defense will size up nicely by the end of the year, and was just blown out by a Florida team that snoozed through the first quarter. Texas also played a deceptively tough game at Laramie, where they too struggled early before hitting the afterburners in the second half. BYU hangs steady at five for the moment, riding largely on last week and the proper disposal of Tulane.

The rest: Oklahoma and VT bounced back nicely, and we try to actually reward teams that play people early and play them tight. Ditto for OSU, still the likely Big Ten champ, and for Georgia, whose defense supplied the butt against South Carolina in lieu of last week’s offensive butt-supplying. Houston pops in as this year’s Texas Tech.

Dropped: Texas Tech, for playing next to no one; Kansas, largely as a result of other teams moving up, not because of anything they did; Florida State, for almost losing to Jacksonville State Florida State almost lost to Jacksonville State type that a lot it feels soooooo good.

This week’s blogpoll ballot follows below and YOU WILL HATE IT. Explanations and zigzaggy blast walls to divert your anger and disbelief follow.

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Alabama	4
2	Texas
3	Southern Cal
4	Florida	3
5	Brigham Young
6	Boise State	8
7	Oklahoma State	6
8	California	2
9	Penn State	3
10	Mississippi	2
11	Missouri
12	Oklahoma	8
13	Cincinnati
14	Ohio State	7
15	LSU	4
16	Miami (Florida)
17	Notre Dame	4
18	Georgia Tech	3
19	Virginia Tech	10
20	Utah	8
21	Kansas
22	Florida State
23	Nebraska
24	Georgia	8
25	Texas Tech	5
Last week’s ballot

Pardon me, but is that Power-Poll-ish? Yes, a bit, but you have two choices as a pollster: go on your sepia-toned memories of yesteryear, or go based on what you have in front of your eyeballs in the shifty but very much present now. The team that put on the best total performance–and the one we saw with our own eyeballs live–was Alabama, who played well in two phases of the game and decently on special teams (versus a very good VT special teams squad MAYBE YOU’VE HEARD OF IT BEAMERBALL’D.)

The others at the top balance the evident and enviable talent of the four or five teams in college football with top rank talent at every position versus the relative worth of their opponent, in descending order. Playing Charleston Southern told you nothing about Florida, while USC and Texas did slightly better on this count. In reality, those three teams are tied in our mind, with Florida pulling into the fourth spot because they played against a D-1AA team, and that has to be penalized somewhere in our universe.

BYU and Boise? Hey, they actually played someone, won, and did so on the national stage. It is early in the season, and there should be huge variances due to a very tiny sample size. The same goes in affirmative for Cal, Missouri, Miami, and anyone else who actually played someone. You may not like it when a Rocky Mountain fattie like Rulon Gardner beats a chiseled Russian god like Alexei Karelin, but it happens, just as it did when BYU beat Oklahoma. This week, they get the gold. That will even out as the season goes on if you like actually ranking what you’re seeing out of a team, or we could just go ahead and keep Oklahoma above them because veeee know soooo much about Oklahoma that you didn’t see on the field. Our choice is to go with what is actually happening with respect toward perceived overall talent, not the other way around.

Ditto for the losers: Florida State, Georgia, and Virginia Tech all actually played someone, though we’re thinking UNC could have easily taken Georgia’s place now that we’re looking at it. If you’re to be punished for playing layup competition, then you shouldn’t be excoriated for taking a loss to quality competition early on, especially if you looked respectable doing it.

Please declare any illogical votes: LSU is too high, but Washington looks to be awake and playing football now, and we’re smitten by their shiny amounts of talent just like everyone else. On Kansas, we plead infatuation with fist-pumping genius Todd Reesing; Cincy was impressive, but reeks a bit of Big East Charity Pick Of the Week; TCU could easily be in there if they played last week, too, were we not willing to take a flyer on Texas Tech and the inspiration Leach has been given by his sweet new parking spot. Based on one week U-Dub is waiting in the wings, but correcting for “UGOGIRL” sentiment keeps them on the lip for now.

BUT BUT BUT BUT– That’s why the Blogpoll takes more than one ballot, lawya.

Our preseason follows; the full composite Blogpoll is, as always, over at MGoBlog.

Rank	Team
1	Florida
2	Texas
3	Southern Cal
4	Oklahoma
5	Alabama
6	Penn State
7	Ohio State
8	Mississippi
9	Virginia Tech
10	California
11	LSU
12	Utah
13	Oklahoma State
14	Boise State
15	Georgia Tech
16	Georgia
17	TCU
18	Iowa
19	Oregon
20	Texas Tech
21	Notre Dame
22	North Carolina
23	Nebraska
24	Oregon State
25	South Florida

Really, once you get past the first two teams, there are only a few certain tiers you can file teams into:

Florida, Texas: Hugely talented blue-chip covered glory bombs studded with talented gamebreakers not losing any significant continuity along lines or under center.

Oklahoma, USC, Ohio State, Alabama, Penn State. See above, but with flux along lines and at skill positions.

The Bourgeoisie Everyone to the mid-teens or so, depending on your fine gradations. Virginia Tech wouldn’t be here, but the loss of Darren Evans moves them into the firmly offense-deficient category for the moment until someone begins getting steady production out of the backfield besides him. Mississippi is probably the best of these on paper, and sure, they’ll blow it and win eight games like Houston Nutt teams under pressure have done in the past, but what we have is paper, so there’s your paper eight. All of these teams have at least one glaring weakness.

The Middle Class. A diverse middle class, at that: wacky fauxhemians (Texas Tech), the loud nouveau-riche (Oklahoma State,) and last year’s flash aristocrats Georgia, who fell from grace and now must work their way up from middle management all over again.

The rest, as usual, is a bleeding mess, but remember: it’s pulled from the same place everyone else is getting their preseason polls, and that is directly and deeply from the ass. Personally, we liked Schnelly’s better after the top slot.

Further proof Barry Switzer never took this shit too seriously (shit=”life”):

(HT: Doc Saturday from this video.)