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Braves & Birds Ballot - Week 2

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Alabama Crimson Tide	--
2	Oklahoma Sooners	--
3	LSU Tigers	--
4	Nebraska Cornhuskers	--
5	Boise St. Broncos	--
6	Wisconsin Badgers	--
7	Florida St. Seminoles	--
8	Stanford Cardinal	--
9	Virginia Tech Hokies	--
10	Texas A&M Aggies	--
11	Arkansas Razorbacks	--
12	Ohio St. Buckeyes	--
13	Oregon Ducks	--
14	West Virginia Mountaineers	--
15	Baylor Bears	--
16	South Carolina Gamecocks	--
17	Oklahoma St. Cowboys	--
18	Florida Gators	--
19	South Florida Bulls	--
20	Mississippi St. Bulldogs	--
21	TCU Horned Frogs	--
22	Missouri Tigers	--
23	Texas Longhorns	--
24	Virginia Cavaliers	--
25	Iowa Hawkeyes	--

SB Nation BlogPoll College Football Top 25 Rankings »

So I don’t know if I’m getting old or what, but I totally forgot to get in a preseason Blogpoll ballot until it was too late.  Subconsciously, I suspect that I didn’t want to get a ballot in because the exercise pulls me all over the place.  Do I make picks based on where I think the teams will finish?  Do I rank based on where I think the teams are in August?  If it’s the former, then I am rewarding teams for playing weak schedules and doing my little part to create self-fulfilling prophecies.  If it’s the latter, then how the hell do I know?

Anyway, some thoughts on the ballot:

• OK, it was only against a I-AA team, but assuming that William & Mary is an above-average I-AA team because they are one of the traditional powers in the CAA (they are, aren’t they?  Jon Stewart, help me out!), then I am feeling good about my optimism regarding Virginia.  This is what a box score should look like when a good team plays a minnow.  UVA had a 300-yard advantage and almost doubled William & Mary in yards per play.  By the way, this paragraph is not exactly a ringing endorsement for the sport of college football.  I am trying to divine meaning in the fact that one team beat a hapless minnow from a lower division worse than other teams did.
• I took the position last week that Texas A&M is going to end up overrated, but based on the evidence so far, they look good.  Holding SMU to 14 points is no joke.  If you would have told me in the summer of 2008 that Rich Rodriguez would be a total failure at Michigan and fired after three years while Mike Sherman would have Texas A&M rolling by year four, then I might have keeled over right there.  Of course, you then could have revived me by saying that Rick Neuheisel will be on his way out at UCLA by 2011.  Some things can be predicted, after all.
• Speaking of cardiac events, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of a Michigan defense that made adjustments to what the opponent was doing and got better as the game went on.
• Yeah, Braxton Miller scares me.  Chris Spielman is not known for being an excessive hyper and he was saying by the fourth quarter that Miller is going to be potentially better than Terrelle Pryor.  An interesting question for Buckeye fans: is it possible that the offense will be better under Luke Fickell because Fickell doesn’t pretend to know that side of the ball and is therefore more likely to give autonomy to offensive coaches?  I guess this theory dies when one realizes that the authority is being given to Jim Bollman.
• So let me get this straight.  The fourth-best coach in college football took his team to a quasi-neutral site to play the worst coach in college football.  The worst coach, a guy who delegates a lot to his coordinators, came into the game with his offensive coordinator just having been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.  His starting quarterback was suspended for his active participation in a bar fight.  So what happens?  LSU 40 Oregon 27.  It’s just amazing that LSU keeps winning games against quality opponents despite the fact that they have a coach who is worse than Ron Zook, worse than the Queen of England, and worse than Mike Locksley.