ATQ Week 1 Blogpoll Ballot

by jtlight on Sep 2, 2008 7:19 AM PDT in ATQ Blogpoll

Ah, week 1, bringer of so much joy, yet you tell us very little. Here's a few things we did learn.

The ACC is truly pathetic. The vaunted Clemson rushing attack couldn't do anything. Virginia Tech lost on their specialty, special team. When your best conference win is over Baylor by only 3 touchdowns, that is not good news.
If you can't run the ball, you will have a very hard time winning. Two of the teams that I dropped out (Oregon State and Clemson) couldn't move the ball on the ground. Oregon State had other things go wrong, but if they had controlled the line as they should have, they would have won. Clemson had 0 net yards on the ground. Both are no longer in my top 25.
Missouri can score some points. The main question now is, will they be able to stop anyone?
UCLA will be very interesting this year. Their defense did a great job, but we'll see how their offense fares over more than a single half, against an opponent that can actually take advantage of opportunities.

Overall, it was a fun week. It was good to see Fresno State and Utah win, though I expected both to. Cal wasn't as impressive as I'd hoped. Southern Cal looked incredible, albeit against an ACC team. Oregon looked great, though it wasn't much of a test (I'll get into that more later). But, football is back. All of this is sure to shake out over the next few weeks and months.

Note that all of the deltas below do not show changes from last weeks Preseason ballot, as that was submitted late. All deltas will be correct for later weeks.

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Southern Cal	25
2	Oklahoma	24
3	Ohio State	23
4	Florida	22
5	Georgia	21
6	LSU	20
7	Missouri	19
8	Texas	18
9	Penn State	17
10	West Virginia	16
11	Auburn	15
12	Texas Tech	14
13	Oregon	13
14	South Florida	12
15	California	11
16	Arizona State	10
17	Alabama	9
18	Kansas	8
19	Brigham Young	7
20	Wisconsin	6
21	Utah	5
22	Fresno State	4
23	South Carolina	3
24	Boise State	2
25	UCLA	1

Dropped Out:

If you think I've made an egregious oversights, or have any other comments, leave 'em below.

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Comments

They look about right

As far as Week 1 Rankings are concerned, they aren’t much better than preseason rankings except that you weed out a few pretenders (Clemson, Virginia Tech, etc). I think South Florida is a little high. Maybe Kansas too. Wisconsin might be a little low. I also think Clemson is still a top 25 team, but low 20s. Other than that, looks good.

by The VD Special on Sep 2, 2008 8:52 PM PDT reply actions

Looks about right.

Keep Bowling Green on your radar. I know, I know…I’m a BGSU alumnus, I’m the resident MAC fan among the ATQ faithful, but that’s a really good football team. 18 starters back from a bowl team that scored 35+ points five times last year, a defense that utterly dominated Pittsburgh in the second half last weekend.

I’m not saying they’re going to run the table or anything, but if they beat Minnesota and Boise the next two weekends, they’re the sort of team that could sneak into fringe (mainstream) top 10 contention by the end of the season just on the basis of a couple of nice non-conference wins and a cakewalk regular season conference schedule.

Of course, if they tank against Minnesota or Boise, they’ll have to win out the rest of the way to crack the top 25.

Don’t sleep on the Falcons. All I’m sayin’.

by thejamootz on Sep 3, 2008 3:23 AM PDT reply actions

I was impressed by them last week

I was actually thinking that the ’stache might be decent this year, but BGSU killed that.

They need to at least beat Minn…and fairly soundly. They are a very bad team.

--www.AddictedToQuack.com

by jtlight on Sep 3, 2008 6:58 AM PDT up reply actions

just out of curiousity

are these all jtlight? or is there some system to this poll? just wonderin

by coolconman on Sep 3, 2008 10:13 PM PDT reply actions

The ATQ Blogpoll ballots are all me this year

So that means there’s no real system ;)

Actually, I’ll be following the normal Blogpoll guidelines, ranking teams early on based on perceived strength, and by the end of the year, ranking teams based on on-the-field accomplishments.

--www.AddictedToQuack.com

by jtlight on Sep 4, 2008 6:22 AM PDT up reply actions