Friday, June 17, 2005

Preseason Hype | by Jay

Brian Cook over at mgoblog has pulled together a novel idea: the BlogPoll, a weekly football ranking conducted by a panel of some of the most fervent college football blogs out there. BGS will be a proud participant, and even though we'll only be getting one vote for the eight of us, it should be pretty interesting to see if we can't collectively do a better job than the BCS. As mentioned earlier (or maybe not), we'll be doing our own weekly poll right here, and then sending the results off to Brian so he can mix them together with the hoi polloi.

As a kickoff to the poll, Brian linked the Scout.com preseason rankings, a composite of a bunch of other preseason polls: Athlon, The Sporting News, CBSSportsLine.com, SI.com, CollegeFootballNews.com, Lindy’s, NationalChamps.net, Scout.com, Football Action, Street & Smith’s, Steele and two polls from ESPN.com (Ivan Maisel and Pat Forde). Here's what it looks like:


1. USC (13; 13-0) 325 points
2. Texas (11-1) 295 points
3. Tennessee (10-3) 267 points
4. Michigan (9-3) 255 points
5. Ohio State (8-4) 245 points
6. Oklahoma (12-1) 244 points
7. Iowa (10-2) 235 points
8. LSU (9-3) 233 points
9. Virginia Tech (10-3) 230 points
9. Florida (7-5) 230 points
11. Miami (Fla.) (9-3) 218 points
12. Louisville (11-1) 179 points
13. Florida State (9-3) 165 points
14. Georgia (10-2) 162 points
15. Auburn (13-0) 125 points
16. Purdue (7-5) 122 points
17. Texas A&M (7-5) 94 points
18. Fresno State (9-3) 84 points
19. Arizona State (9-3) 75 points
19. Boise State (11-1) 75 points
21. Cal (10-2) 49 points
22. Texas Tech (8-4) 46 points
23. Pittsburgh (8-4) 37 points
24. Boston College (9-3) 35 points
25. Georgia Tech (7-5) 29 points
26. Alabama (6-6) 26 points
27. Bowling Green (9-3) 22 points
28. Oregon (5-6) 16 points
28. Virginia (8-4) 16 points
30. Wisconsin (9-3) 12 points
31. Nebraska (5-6) 10 points
31. N.C. State (5-6) 10 points
33. Penn State (4-7) 8 points
33. Minnesota (7-5) 8 points
35. Wyoming (7-5) 6 points
35. Iowa State (7-5) 6 points
37. Colorado (8-5) 4 points
38. Utah (12-0) 3 points
38. Miami (Ohio) (8-5) 3 points
40. UCLA (6-6) 2 points
40. UTEP (8-4) 2 points

So here's an obvious question to get this party started right. From this grand composite of peerless prognosticators, who looks overrated to you? And which teams are being taken too lightly? (And feel free to include other teams not mentioned. Wonder who that could be.)