Results for Week 2
1
-1SB Nation BlogPoll College Football Rankings 2011
Alabama's up top, Wisconsin and Arkansas are both out and UCLA made a 21-spot leap.
Yep, sounds like the SB Nation BlogPoll. A nice mix of what you'd expect following another beatdown by the Crimson Tide and crippling losses for the Badgers and Razorbacks, and the Bruins soaring after their 36-30 upset of the Nebraska Huskers. Nebraska also fell out of SB Nation's Top 25.
Madison likely won't be too much poll-watching for a bit -- or will we, until the Badgers are back in it? But there's a lot to dissect and discuss in here, and once again, B5Q was singled out for its voting. So please, make the jump for some observations on this week's results and chime in with your thoughts.
In case you need a refresher, here's how I voted this week. Of course, I had Wisconsin and Arkansas both tumbling. But I kept both teams on my ballot, still believing their two of the top 25 teams in the nation. If current trends hold, however, that won't hold up.
On Andy Hutchins' post on the mothership site, B5Q makes an appearance in the award(?) for Jim Tressel's Numb Existence for our stubbornness in being slow to react to macro-scale shifts in college football. What do you think about that? I imagine that has to do with my persistent inclusion of Wisconsin and Arkansas.
Also, as mentioned above, UCLA settles in at No. 20 in the mothership's poll this week, a 21-spot climb from its off-the-ballot status of last week. Sure, the Bruins deserve a climb. But that much? Either all of us bloggers severely underestimated them at the beginning of the season, or we were awfully impressed by a six-point upset of the Huskers at home.
Of course, there will always be disparities in voting mentality here, and our friend babaoreally from Off Tackle Empire shared some interesting thoughts in that regard in his comments on my ballot this week:
Wisconsin and Arkansas shouldn't be in the Top 25
It’s only two weeks into the season, and both of these teams have bad losses. This seems like a case of trying to justify preseason rankings instead of looking at how teams have performed so far in the short season.
Here are some teams that deserve to be in the Top 25 instead of Arkansas and Wisconsin: Northwestern, Arizona, Oregon St., UL-Monroe, Iowa State and Louisville. I’m sure there are more.
I’m not trying to be overly critical here; I just don’t like it when teams that have lost to unranked opponents stay in the Top 25 only because they started the season there. If Arkansas and Wisconsin were not in the preseason Top 25, absolutely no one would argue that they deserve to be there now based on their performance in the 2012 football season.
I chose not to make any revisions to my ballot this week, though us BlogPoll voters do have that option up until the poll locks. I do admire babaoreally's approach to voting, though. If we all set aside preseason expectations and voted purely upon our in-season expectations, these polls would be remarkably different. Sure, plenty -- most? -- voters and bloggers have Wisconsin and Arkansas outside their top 25. But imagine if instead of a school like Ohio -- entering this week's poll at No. 25 -- or Tennessee, Arizona, etc., sliding up, you had programs like Lousiana-Monroe and Iowa State in there? Imagine the chaos that would cause in "real life" -- not to disparage the BlogPoll, or anything -- college football? Heck, as upset as I am about the Badgers' loss in Corvallis, I wouldn't have too many qualms with sneaking Oregon State onto the bottom portion of my ballot. Not that they were overly dominant, but they're 2-0 and sitting pretty while Wisconsin, well, isn't.
Frankly, this kind of discussion could -- and absolutely should -- go on longer. But Sons of Anarchy starts in six minutes, and I've been geeking out for tonight's premiere for the past week. So I'll end here, but with the hope that we can get some discussion going in the comments. How did SB Nation do on this week's BlogPoll? How was my ballot? I'd love to hear.