Blog Pollin Week Two

Long time reader, first (maybe second) time commentator. I love the blog guys, but Boise St. at #1 doesn’t make much sense. Unless your a straight up resume voter, and you’re only putting them number 1 because they are the only team with a quality win. Did you watch the game? It was a comedy of errors for both teams. Honestly, if you switch the jerseys and that was LSU barely beating VA tech, people would be calling for Miles’ head. Ok, people are always calling for his head – but you get the point. Boise State is a quality program, but they aren’t the best team in the country. They barely beat a VA tech team that looks like it will be the same as they have for the last five years, a good defense with a decent, and sometimes bad offense, that wins 9 or 10 games in the terrible morass of badness that is the ACC.

I am going to add you to the media masses who want to see the Boise State underdogs fight the BCS bullies and change the landscape of football…. right… okay, so they don’t schedule a round one patsy…. just the rest of their schedule is pretty much ridiculous….. hop on the bandwagon and maybe ESPN will sign you up!

and to think we were a quarter and some change away from moving near the head of the class in that thing

I get the resume voting, but if you want to vote for a team that “beat someone” the first week, why not make TCU #1? I didn’t actually get to see that game, but from what I heard, they were a lot more convincing than BSU. If that’s true, then keeping BSU ahead of TCU isn’t resume voting, it’s sticking with your preseason ideas.

But I’ve never really understood a straight up resume vote the first few weeks of the season. It makes no more sense to me than sticking straight with preseason guesses. We don’t know if any of these teams will turn out to be really good – whether it’s BSU, TCU or VA tech? And if teams really make the biggest improvements from week 1 to week 2 – who cares about week 1 anyway? If you’re going to put BSU and TCU 1 and 2 because they beat teams with a pulse, you should put LSU ahead of Bama and Texas. Even without half their defense UNC is way better than the teams Bama and UT played. Now I’m not saying that LSU should be # 3, I’m suggesting the idea of resume voting this early in the season is just kind of silly.

If you’re willing to make drastic changes throughout, then the issue is kind of moot, because you’re not assuming BSU can’t move down without a loss – but it becomes incumbent on you to rethink the entire ballot every week if you’re going to do it that way.

LSU Jonno, I guess you were talking to me. No, I don’t mean no blog polls until week 8, though it wouldn’t be a terrible idea if the coaches waited until at least week 4 (I could care less about the AP). What I’m suggesting is that voters shouldn’t stick to either 1) preseason guesses or 2) straight up resume voting or 3) how great/bad did they looking slaughtering/escaping a bad team. Instead, a combination of the three is needed. If you really think that Boise St. is the best team based on a combination of 1) beat the best opponent 2) looked the best doing it and 3) confirmed your preseason/early season thoughts- then fine. I might disagree, but that’s reasonable.

But I don’t see why X team should be voted #1 after one week because they scheduled a tough game week 1, rather than week 2. And if you’re going to use more factors than just the opponent’s skill level to make a week one ranking, then I don’t think BSU belongs at the top. They really didn’t look that great beating a VA tech team that pretty much imploded out of the gate.

If you, or Poseur disagrees, that’s fine, I can appreciate that. It’s not an unreasonable poll by any means. What I would like is some sort of explanation about the criteria used to make up the blog rankings. Is Poseur using a straight up resume vote? If so, then as he said in an earlier comment, LSU has one of better wins of week 1 and should be ranked in the top ten. If it’s a combination of factors, what are those factors? How good the team looked winning? What we thought we knew about them in the preseason? Gut instinct?

It’s the first week of the season, what better time than now to have a post and debate about what a good ranking system should look like? Poseur, what do you think?

Just saw Poseur’s post after I posted mine. And you’re right, you clearly are willing to drop teams without a loss, which I think is great. And you’re right about home vs. away, I hadn’t considered that with TCU. I appreciate the power vs. resume explanation. And I agree with you, especially late in the season.

I’ve enjoyed the discussion – but why in the world are the posts so messed up? They never seem to post in any sort of chronological order.

Also, I am not sure how I feel about resume polling, however, I don’t think that a team should be rewarded for beating the likes of Samford, FAMU, San Jose State, etc.

Boise and TCU have two of the better wins from the weekend. But, unless they win out with every game decided by 50 points, I can’t see putting them in the NC game over an undefeated “power” conference school. One quality victory does not a champion make…Yoga speak for you gotta prove yourself more than once in a season to get to the big dance.

I also think that UF should take a greater hit for their weak victory over the mighty Redhawks.

just to maintain the integrity of the process, this early in the season, it is probably impossible, as a human, or even statistically alone to not have some “resume voting” aspect to your vote. After all, we have no idea how teams will perform this year and who is “good or bad” except for their coaches, programs, recruiting classes, returning starters, etc. Hence “resume voting” is really all it really is anyway.