BlogPoll Ballot: 11/02

Here is this week's ballot. A little commentary follows, but I have exam Thursday (Perturbation Methods, ick) so the explanation is short and posting will be pretty light all week. I'll probably have my response to the latest BlogPoll Roundtable up tomorrow. The ballot is due at 10AM tomorrow. Comments, critiques and suggestions all always welcome.

Rank	Team	Delta
1	LSU	--
2	Southern Cal	--
3	California	1
4	Ohio State	2
5	South Florida	12
6	Boston College	4
7	Oregon	--
8	Kentucky	3
9	South Carolina	4
10	Wisconsin	2
11	Kansas State	15
12	Oklahoma	9
13	Missouri	1
14	Virginia Tech	6
15	Auburn	11
16	Florida	8
17	West Virginia	12
18	Georgia	--
19	Cincinnati	3
20	Michigan State	5
21	Purdue	--
22	Kansas	--
23	Miami (Florida)	--
24	Rutgers	9
25	Arizona State	1

Dropped Out: Texas (#9), Clemson (#19).

This is the first ballot I've put together this season entirely without looking at the previous ballot. My apologies to Cincinnati, I don't know why I liked them better last week. LSU is still #1, although I suppose that is getting to the point of not needed explanation any more. South Florida is higher than I would like, but BC's resume looks less impressive than it did a couple of weeks ago and I'm not really sold on anybody else in the top-10, save perhaps Oregon.

I'm inclined to view Oklahoma as an upset victim who was caught off guard, but WVU, Florida and Texas as pretenders who got exposed. That is clearly the subjective part of my rankings and should be taken with a grain of salt. All I can say is that things should sort themselves out as more results come in.

Michigan State really improved in my eyes, although it could just be that Wisconsin (and the whole Big Ten really) is bad. I'm not sure about that one yet.

Missouri is probably high, but Illinois is looking like a pretty good team and Mizzou hasn't lost yet. Also a little too high is VT, buoyed by their loss to LSU earlier this season. The big jump for them has more to do with teams losing and me not looking at last week's ballot.

I started with a list of 47 teams, listed their good wins (wins against the other 46 teams on the list) and their losses. Then I tried to make a reasonable ballot by dragging a team up the list until I felt comfortable with where they were. This is probably 60% resume, 30% expectation and 10% scotch. If you are curious, the next half dozen teams were GT, Clemson, Alabama, Colorado, Texas and Virginia. It was tempting to try and find a place for CU (losses to FSU and ASU, both in my top 25) and Virginia (beat GT, lost to Wyoming(!)) but I just couldn't do it.