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Today marks the final day in the regular season blogpoll at ATQ. All in all I think the Matt and Noah experiment worked pretty well and made for some interesting results. We disagreed significantly about certain teams early in the season, but as time went on our individual rankings became more and more aligned. I guess playing actual football games helps inform one's view!
Overall I think both Matt and I took the responsibility of ranking teams week in and week out pretty seriously. The experience certainly changed the way I watched college football, challenging me to focus on a lot more teams throughout the season rather than just the Pac-12 and a few others. Doing weekly rankings also made me appreciate just how hard the job can be and only re-enforced for me how important it is to settle these debates on the field.
Soon we will have the first playoff in college football, albeit with just four teams. I hope wiser minds prevail and it opens the doors for a more legitimate 8 or 16-team playoff in the future. Look at the top four teams in our poll and tell me that there aren't at least three or four other teams who could also challenge for a national title if given the chance.
In other news, Matt put together a neat little statistic about what teams occupied each poll position most frequently. Hopefully I am not stealing his thunder for a future post by including the top five here:
- Alabama (10 weeks)
- Oregon (8 weeks)
- Oregon (5 weeks)
- 5 teams (2 weeks)
- Georgia (5 weeks)
That's right, Oregon spent 13 weeks in the top 3, and one other week ranked number 4. It says a lot about who the Oregon Ducks are as a team and program that they were in the top 5 wire-to-wire during the regular season. Savor it, Ducks fans. It was an outstanding year, their fourth in a row under head coach Chip Kelly. Who knows when this run of success will end, but rest assured that even if it ends tomorrow, you will still tell your kids and grandkids that this was a golden age for Oregon Ducks football.
Onto the poll:
Addicted to Quack Ballot - Week 14
| Rank | Team | Delta |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Notre Dame Fighting Irish | -- |
| 2 | Alabama Crimson Tide | -- |
| 3 | Oregon Ducks | -- |
| 4 | Kansas St. Wildcats |
 1 |
| 5 | Georgia Bulldogs |
 -1 |
| 6 | Stanford Cardinal |
1 |
| 7 | Ohio St. Buckeyes |
-1 |
| 8 | Florida Gators | -- |
| 9 | Oklahoma Sooners | -- |
| 10 | Texas A&M Aggies | -- |
| 11 | LSU Tigers | -- |
| 12 | Florida St. Seminoles |
2 |
| 13 | South Carolina Gamecocks |
-1 |
| 14 | Clemson Tigers |
1 |
| 15 | Oregon St. Beavers |
3 |
| 16 | Northern Illinois Huskies |
1 |
| 17 | UCLA Bruins |
-1 |
| 18 | Utah State Aggies |
2 |
| 19 | San Jose St. Spartans |
2 |
| 20 | Nebraska Cornhuskers |
-7 |
| 21 | Louisville Cardinals | -- |
| 22 | Northwestern Wildcats |
1 |
| 23 | Boise St. Broncos | -- |
| 24 | Fresno St. Bulldogs |
1 |
| 25 | Kent St. Golden Flashes |
-6 |
| Dropouts: Texas Longhorns, Central Florida Knights | ||
SB Nation BlogPoll College Football Top 25 Rankings "