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.)