Brian Cook

Rank	Team	PPB	StdDev	Delta
1	Alabama (57)	25.0	0.1	--
2	Boise State (1)	23.1	1.0	3
3	Florida	22.9	0.8	3
4	Texas	22.8	0.9	2
5	Ohio State	20.3	1.0	3
6	TCU	19.9	1.6	3
7	Iowa	18.9	1.0	3
8	Cincinnati	17.8	2.0	4
9	Penn State	16.2	2.1	3
10	Oregon	15.6	1.8	3
11	Virginia Tech	15.2	2.8	--
12	Georgia Tech	13.0	2.7	3
13	Brigham Young	12.7	2.9	2
14	Nebraska	11.9	2.5	6
15	Pittsburgh	10.9	3.2	1
16	Wisconsin	9.6	3.1	7
17	LSU	8.3	3.1	3
18	Utah	6.6	3.6	7
19	Miami (Florida)	6.2	2.8	6
20	Mississippi	5.1	3.0	6
21	Southern Cal	4.6	3.3	5
22	Texas Tech	3.3	2.7	4
23	Central Michigan	3.3	3.0	1
24	Clemson	2.3	2.9	2
25	West Virginia	1.6	2.7	6

Also Receiving Votes: Navy(1.5), Stanford(1.3), Oklahoma(1.1), Oklahoma State(0.9), Oregon State(0.8), Arizona(0.7), Arkansas(0.3), Virginia(0.3), Connecticut(0.2), Houston(0.2), Auburn(0.1), Florida State(0.1), Rutgers(0.1), Georgia(0.1), California(0.1), Northwestern(0.1), Middle Tennessee State(0.1), Air Force(0.0), North Carolina(0.0),

Total Ballots: 58

Votes by blog here , votes by team here .

Plenty of movement, as you might expect when everyone plays someone about as good as everyone else, and one final non-move at the top: Alabama is #1 nearly unanimously, with one voter going for Boise State. Elsewhere, teams mostly move up or down three spots based on a bowl win or loss. Some got bigger bumps: Nebraska, Wisconsin, Utah, and Mississippi are biggest winners after surprising or flat dominant performances. Miami and West Virginia get the harshest treatment amongst the losers.

Justify Your Existence

So… yeah. By the end of the year there isn't much room for disagreement when all the results are in. And the coaches poll did, unfortunately, fix their goofy decision to put Penn State above an Iowa team with a tougher schedule, identical record, and head-to-head victory.

But there is one team with all the votes in every poll across the country: Alabama. And there is one poll in which the Crimson Tide ascended to #1 early and returned to it frequently: the Blogpoll. This poll was the only one in which the results on the field were enough to move the voters before the inevitable.

Other differences:

• The Blogpoll moves Boise State to #2; the coaches keep the Broncos behind Texas and Florida.
• West Virginia barely holds on at #25; they're #22 to the coaches.

As I said: at the end of the year it's hard to have a lot of disagreement. But in the event there was a choice to be made at the top, I think it's evident that bloggers are in a better spot to do that than the current folk.

Wack Ballot Watchdog

Now that the horn has tooted, the soft seamy underbelly of the thing:

• Your Boise State voter is Card Chronicle . 
• The Auburner  is still really into Arizona (#15) despite the Cats getting smashed by Nebraska.
• This is almost certainly an error: Beat Visitor puts Virginia, not Virginia Tech #11.
• From The Rumble Seat, who we'll see later, puts Cincinnati way down at #17 .

Now on to the extracurriculars. First up are the teams which spur the most disagreement between voters as measured by standard deviation.

Most Disagreement

#	Team	StdDev
1	Utah	3.6
2	Southern Cal	3.3
3	Pittsburgh	3.2
4	LSU	3.1
5	Wisconsin	3.1

The Mountain West's season-long dominance of this category comes home with a final win. USC, meanwhile, figures to finish high up in this category's preseason balloting after an offseason of turmoil.

Ballot Math

First up are "Mr. Bold" and "Mr. Numb Existence." The former goes to the voter with the ballot most divergent from the poll at large. The number you see is the average difference between a person's opinion of a team and the poll's opinion.

Mr. Bold

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	From The Rumble Seat	Georgia Tech		3.11
2	Dawg Sports	Georgia		3.00
3	Bleed Scarlet	Rutgers		2.69
4	Hey Jenny Slater	Georgia		2.65
5	Frank Helps You	Tulane		2.56

The state of Georgia dominates the final collection of weird ballots of the year, with GT blog From The Rumble Seat taking top honors. Nothing on their ballot is too weird until Virginia Tech shoots up to #8 from totally unranked. But the Hokies did club Tennessee something wicked and the VT vote from FTRS is a lot closer to the poll consensus, so this actually represents a correction.

The weird stuff actually starts at #15, where Oklahoma State—booted from the poll at large—resides despite losing to Ole Miss limply. Okie State is even up one spot. Then you've got Cincinnati crushed all the way down to #17, West Virginia up three to #20 after the Gator pratfall, and a number of other strange or indefensible postseason moves.

Mr. Numb Existence

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	WSU Football Blog	Washington State		0.76
2	The Wolverine Blog	Michigan		0.77
3	Corn Nation	Nebraska		0.78
4	Bama Sports Report	Alabama		0.81
5	Dan Shanoff	Florida		0.94

This award's season-long tendency to go to the cold, desparate stragglers at the end of I-A sees Washington State and Michigan bloggers finish one-two before descending into the fat and happy—at least mostly—realms of Nebraska, Alabama, and Florida blogs.

Our pointless, season-long quest for a Perfect Ballot, or at least a Perfect Top Two, ends with a thud: WSU Football blog goes with Texas and refuses to put Boise State higher than #5.

Next we have the Coulter/Kos Award and the Straight Bangin' Award , which are again different sides of the same coin. The CKA and SBA go to the blogs with the highest and lowest bias rating, respectively. Bias rating is calculated by subtracting the blogger's vote for his own team from the poll-wide average. A high number indicates you are shameless homer. A low number indicates that you suffer from an abusive relationship with your football team.

The Coulter/Krugman Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	Block U	Utah		4.38
2	From The Rumble Seat	Georgia Tech		3.98
3	Double Extra Point	Nebraska		3.07
4	Linebacker-U	Penn State		1.78
5	Barking Carnival	Texas		1.19

For about the first time all year, the CK Award just plain failed. Block U  was the last poll's winner and thus drew the whammy for its Poinsettia Bowl matchup against Cal. Utah covered a three point spread by seven. Last time's runner up was West Virginia, though, so there's that.

Block U wins here again, but the foul award has demonstrated no power to punish foes across season. Also there will be a preseason poll that supersedes this one when opening week 2010 rolls around. Congratulations, Utah. We would have gotten away with it without you meddling Samoans. 

For the record, the CK Award finished the year 10-5 against the spread and 9-6 straight up. Some of those covers were beyond painful, though. They include Iowa's three-point win against Arkansas State and Nebraska's heart-crushing defeat in the Big 12 championship game. Sometimes the horror this thing doles out is not captured by numbers.

The Straight Bangin' Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	Dan Shanoff	Florida		-0.93
2	Black Heart Gold Pants	Iowa		-0.90
3	RazorBloggers	Arkansas		-0.29
4	From Old Virginia	Virginia		-0.26
5	SimonOnSports	Connecticut		-0.21

This place is a ghost town, with the winner and second place turning in ballots that had their teams one spot below the poll consensus; the remainder omitted their teams that didn't really deserve votes anyway. Half-hearted congratulations to Dan Shanoff.

Swing is the total change in each ballot from last week to this week (obviously voters who didn't submit a ballot last week are not included). A high number means you are easily distracted by shiny things. A low number means that you're damn sure you're right no matter what reality says.

Mr. Manic-Depressive

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	SimonOnSports	Connecticut		164
2	Clone Chronicles	Iowa State		162
3	Boiled Sports	Purdue		158
4	BC Interruption	Boston College		150
5	Over the Pylon	Ball State		150

I'm not really sure how one gets swings this big on the last week of the season, but here they are. Simon on Sports  is your winner with an impressive 164.

I guess it helps when you shove Penn State at #24 only to see them beat LSU, or have Miami #13 only to have them lose to previously unranked Wisconsin. UNC—inexplicably included last time—is gone after being #16, and the only team on the ballot not to move is #1 Alabama.

Mr. Stubborn

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	Black Heart Gold Pants	Iowa		62
2	Linebacker-U	Penn State		84
3	One Bronco Nation Under God	Boise State		84
4	BCS Guru	UCLA		90
5	Frank Helps You	Tulane		92

On the flip site, Black Heart Gold Pants  wins this by an epic margin of 22. This is borne of two things: faith in the Big 10 and general calmness (or apathy) in the face of a  bowl result. BHGP already had three Big Ten teams in the top ten and Wisconsin chilling comfortably at #17 and had to move those teams far less than virtually everyone else in the poll. And then there's stuff like Cincinnati dropping a single slot or Miami just three or GT just two and LSU actually moving up and so forth and so on.

Rank	Team	PPB	StdDev	Delta
1	Alabama (77)	25.0	0.1	1
2	Texas (1)	23.3	0.9	1
3	TCU	23.0	0.9	1
4	Cincinnati	22.2	1.0	1
5	Boise State	20.9	1.0	1
6	Florida	20.2	1.4	5
7	Oregon	19.0	0.6	--
8	Ohio State	17.7	1.2	--
9	Georgia Tech	16.7	1.4	1
10	Iowa	15.3	2.5	1
11	Virginia Tech	14.1	2.3	--
12	Penn State	13.6	3.3	--
13	Miami (Florida)	11.5	2.5	2
14	LSU	11.5	3.1	2
15	Brigham Young	9.6	4.0	2
16	Pittsburgh	8.8	3.5	3
17	Oregon State	8.1	3.7	3
18	Stanford	7.1	3.7	3
19	West Virginia	6.9	3.6	5
20	Nebraska	5.9	3.1	3
21	Oklahoma State	5.8	3.1	1
22	Arizona	5.2	3.7	4
23	Wisconsin	2.9	3.3	3
24	Central Michigan	2.4	2.8	2
25	Utah	2.3	2.9	1

Also Receiving Votes: Southern Cal(1.2), Clemson(0.9), Houston(0.9), California(0.8), Northwestern(0.7), Texas Tech(0.4), East Carolina(0.4), North Carolina(0.3), Mississippi(0.2), Navy(0.1), Oklahoma(0.1), Tennessee(0.1), Troy(0.0), Arkansas(0.0), Temple(0.0), Missouri(0.0), South Carolina(0.0),

Total Ballots: 78

Votes by blog here , votes by team here .

Not a lot went down over a weekend in which a lot of things almost happened. The main thing was Alabama putting an end to the season-long wishy-washiness at the top of the poll, emerging as a near-unanimous #1 after throttling Tim Tebow and some other guys 32-13.

Elsewhere, Pitt slips a little after narrowly losing to Cincinnati, WVU makes a leap, and the back end of the poll is fresh and new; Central Michigan finally gets in after a season wondering why persistent mediocrities kept scraping in at the back of the poll.

Justify Your Existence

The Blogpoll's season-long willingness to consider anyone other than Florida a plausible choice at #1 was validated by the outcome of the SEC championship game even if the poll reacted to the last week of the season by installing Florida at the top. Even with that shift the battle for #1 was tight.

As for major differences: we've kind of run out. But it was a good run.

Wack Ballot Watchdog

The lone #1 vote for Texas will get handled in Mr. Bold. Other anomalies:

• Tennessee blog Gate 21 was just itching to give it to Florida , I guess, as they drop the Gators down to #13—behind luminaries like Penn State, LSU, and BYU—which is three spots worse than anyone else and I'm cocking an eyebrow at anyone who would even put them that low.
• Kentucky blog A Sea Of Blue has Houston #14, 4 slots higher than anyone else. Houston didn't even average 1 point per ballot.
• Similarly, poll nonentity North Carolina is #16 to UConn blog Simon on Sports ; there is one other guy voting North Carolina #20—Sea of Blue again—and then a few folks who throw UNC in at the tail end of their ballot.
• And saving the weirdest for last: Orange::44 is a Syracuse blog and was thus presumably one of the few people to actually watch actual Northwestern actually lose to Syracuse early in the year. This has not dissuaded them from merrily marching the Wildcats into the top 15 ; they actually sit 13th on their latest ballot, four spots ahead of even the weirdos who ranked the 'Cats 17th. Northwestern, like UNC and Houston, isn't even in the poll and averaged less than a point per ballot.
• Dawg Sports didn't bother to drop USC for losing to Arizona—they did, on the other hand, shoot Arizona up to #13—and are thus the poll's most enthusiastic USC voter ; the Trojans check in at #15.

Now on to the extracurriculars. First up are the teams which spur the most disagreement between voters as measured by standard deviation.

Most Disagreement

#	Team	StdDev
1	Brigham Young	4.0
2	Oregon State	3.7
3	Arizona	3.7
4	Stanford	3.7
5	West Virginia	3.6

BYU: your most confusing team. I'm with the people ranking them low, for what it's worth.

Ballot Math

First up are "Mr. Bold" and "Mr. Numb Existence." The former goes to the voter with the ballot most divergent from the poll at large. The number you see is the average difference between a person's opinion of a team and the poll's opinion.

Mr. Bold

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	Let's Go Rockets	Toledo		3.26
2	Dawg Sports	Georgia		3.13
3	Gate 21	Tennessee		2.89
4	Braves and Birds	Georgia		2.83
5	From The Rumble Seat	Georgia Tech		2.71

Let's Go Rockets is the only voter in the poll who goes with Texas #1 and dares to drop Florida behind not only Oregon but also Penn State(!?). This appears to be some lingering SEC hatred for whatever reasons. But then the order of teams in the Big Ten is just all goofy: Penn State is #7 and two teams (Ohio State and Iowa) that beat them by two scores and have equal records, better nonconference schedules, and bigger wins languish at 14 and 15. Oklahoma State's been permitted to stay at #13 after getting hammered by Oklahoma, Cal is #18, etc., etc., etc. Very odd all around.

Mr. Numb Existence

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	Red and Black Attack	Northern Illinois		0.79
2	Fantasy College Blitz	Oklahoma State		1.02
3	The Wolverine Blog	Michigan		1.03
4	Foul Balls	Notre Dame		1.05
5	Block C	Clemson		1.05

Wow, Red and Black Attack obliterates the year's best number in this category—which was just under 1.0—with a ballot that doesn't even get past #2 (TCU) before there's a difference from the poll at large. Odd.

Next we have the Coulter/Kos Award and the Straight Bangin' Award , which are again different sides of the same coin. The CKA and SBA go to the blogs with the highest and lowest bias rating, respectively. Bias rating is calculated by subtracting the blogger's vote for his own team from the poll-wide average. A high number indicates you are shameless homer. A low number indicates that you suffer from an abusive relationship with your football team.

The Coulter/Krugman Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	Block U	Utah		4.67
2	WVU Pressbox	West Virginia		4.12
3	Double Extra Point	Nebraska		4.06
4	Big Red Network	Nebraska		3.06
5	Corn Nation	Nebraska		3.06

So we have definitive proof that Ndamukong Suh is invulnerable to the foul power of the CK Award. This makes the foul power of the CK Award exactly like offensive linemen and nuclear weapons worldwide. Not invulnerable: Nebraska's kickoff specialist. The Cornhuskers lost in a fashion so utterly painful that it's tempting to declare the CK Award the victor here despite NU's easy cover. But they did cover, bringing the award's record here

The last blogger to tempt fate this year will be Block U , which stuck Utah #18 and narrowly beats out a horde of Nebraska bloggers and one lone WVU supporter to draw the bowl game whammy. Utah is a three-point underdog against Cal in the Poinsettia Bowl.

The Straight Bangin' Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	SportsFrog	Central Michigan		-2.37
2	Conquest Chronicles	Southern Cal		-1.24
3	Block C	Clemson		-0.91
4	California Golden Blogs	California		-0.82
5	Gobbler Country	Virginia Tech		-0.12

Very strange victory here as I don't think a mid-major supporter has ever finished in the top five, let alone won this thing. Usually fans of teams like Central Michigan are so giddy that the team seems good that they end up on the other list. They certainly don't fail to rank their team entirely when there's almost no way to rationalize them out of the poll.

Swing is the total change in each ballot from last week to this week (obviously voters who didn't submit a ballot last week are not included). A high number means you are easily distracted by shiny things. A low number means that you're damn sure you're right no matter what reality says.

Mr. Manic-Depressive

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	From The Rumble Seat	Georgia Tech		108
2	Red and Black Attack	Northern Illinois		104
3	Hammer & Rails	Purdue		98
4	Let's Go Rockets	Toledo		96
5	Block U	Utah		94

How do you get up to 108 points of swing after a weekend in which like ten teams played?

First, start with Alabama #4 and drop Florida behind Oregon. Then shuffle the back of the poll like mad: Pitt down 14(!?!) for losing by a point to undefeated Cincinnati, Ohio State down three and Iowa and Penn State up three despite all of those teams finishing their seasons two weeks ago, Oklahoma State up eight and Houson up seven inexplicably, Virginia Tech completely omitted after not playing this weekend and being #10 last week… this is not engineering's finest moment.

I couldn't find an explanation or even a ballot at From The Rumble Seat, so it is what it is.

Double weird is R&B Attack , your Numb Existence winner, showing up second here. He must have significantly de-crazied his ballot this week.

Mr. Stubborn

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	The Ciskie Blog	Wisconsin		26
2	NittanyWhiteOut	Penn State		38
3	Anton Azucar	Miami (Florida)		40
4	Rock M Nation	Missouri		40
5	mgoblog	Michigan		44

I have no problems with low swings this week since there were so few games. A quick glance at the winner's ballot seems totally reasonable except for maybe being too kind to USC. Okay, definitely being too kind to USC.

 

Rank	Team	PPB	StdDev	Delta
1	Florida (39)	24.3	0.9	1
2	Alabama (28)	23.9	1.0	1
3	Texas (8)	23.3	0.9	--
4	TCU (4)	22.2	1.1	--
5	Cincinnati	21.0	0.8	--
6	Boise State	20.2	0.7	--
7	Oregon	18.8	0.6	2
8	Ohio State	17.8	1.7	2
9	Iowa	15.2	3.0	3
10	Georgia Tech	14.8	2.8	3
11	Virginia Tech	14.0	3.0	3
12	Penn State	13.7	3.3	1
13	Pittsburgh	11.5	2.8	5
14	Oregon State	11.1	3.6	1
15	Miami (Florida)	10.5	3.0	2
16	LSU	10.0	3.7	2
17	Brigham Young	8.3	4.7	3
18	Southern Cal	8.1	3.3	1
19	Houston	6.4	3.7	5
20	California	6.1	3.5	3
21	Stanford	5.7	4.4	5
22	Oklahoma State	4.7	2.8	11
23	Nebraska	4.4	2.9	3
24	West Virginia	3.1	2.8	2
25	Clemson	1.4	2.3	9

Also Receiving Votes: Utah(1.3), Central Michigan(1.0), Wisconsin(0.9), Arizona(0.5), Northwestern(0.3), Texas Tech(0.3), North Carolina(0.2), Navy(0.1), Mississippi(0.1), Arkansas(0.1), Rutgers(0.0), Troy(0.0), Tennessee(0.0), Temple(0.0), Missouri(0.0), Ohio(0.0),

Total Ballots: 79

Votes by blog here , votes by team here .

Get a good look at the up and down arrows because you won't see much of them next week, and then there's just the post-bowl poll before the long, cold dark of the offseason. Florida's dominant performance against Florida State coupled with weak wins from Texas and Alabama propels the Gators into the season's last disputed #1 spot; even with a Texas win the SEC champion figures to be nigh-unanimous next week.

Elsewhere, Pitt and Georgia Tech cede ground after losses, though Tech has a soft landing after narrowly losing to Georgia with Josh Nesbitt out or injured much of the game. Neither gets hammered nearly as severely as Clemson or Oklahoma State.

Doctor Saturday will be pleased to see Utah outside the poll. Barely outside, but outside.

Justify Your Existence

With the poll going back over to Florida hegemony, the best argument for the BlogPoll over the things that actually comprise the BCS this week is the coaches continued, inane insistence that Penn State should be ranked ahead of Iowa. Here PSU's incredibly weak schedule is duly punished and instead of Penn State 9, Iowa 10, it's Iowa 9, Penn State 12.

By this point in the season there's not a whole lot of opportunity to defy the conventional wisdoom elsewhere; there are a bunch of teams two or three spots off their Coaches' poll position but nothing that screams justice like the above comparison.

Wack Ballot Watchdog

There's not a whole lot of flat crazy stuff this week, but a sampling:

• There are a few teams with crazy distributions. Ohio State is almost universally 7, 8, or 9, but there's this small cadre of five voters clustered around #14. Northwestern gets a few pity/sympathy/whatever I'm out of teams votes toward the tail end of the poll, and then two Big Ten bloggers slot them in at #18. Daily Gopher and NittanyWhiteOut : seriously? Seriously Northwestern as the #18 team in all the land? They lost to Syracuse!
• Boiled Sports hates Virginia Tech , ranking the Hokies #25. Next worst vote is #18.
• Roll Bama Roll , oddly, is a huge Central Michigan fan . They place the Chips #14; 18th is the best anyone else will do.
• I'm not even going to bother with the TCU voters since at this point I'd probably have to do the same with anyone holding on to Texas as the #1 team in the country, and one you get to twelve goofy first place votes that's too many to catalog here.

Ballot Math

Now on to the extracurriculars. First up are the teams which spur the most disagreement between voters as measured by standard deviation.

Most Disagreement

#	Team	StdDev
1	Brigham Young	4.8
2	Stanford	4.4
3	Houston	3.8
4	LSU	3.7
5	Oregon State	3.6

BYU's 10-2 record with horrific loss to FSU is indeed confusing. 

Next up are "Mr. Bold" and "Mr. Numb Existence." The former goes to the voter with the ballot most divergent from the poll at large. The number you see is the average difference between a person's opinion of a team and the poll's opinion.

Mr. Bold

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	Let's Go Rockets	Toledo		3.00
2	Bleed Scarlet	Rutgers		2.93
3	Boiled Sports	Purdue		2.88
4	Black Heart Gold Pants	Iowa		2.78
5	Gate 21	Tennessee		2.73

Let's Go Rockets picks up the week's weirdest poll and the reasons are right there in the 10-12 range: BYU, Cal, and Houston. All of those folk are at least seven spots lower in the poll at large. #19 Iowa gets boned, as do Oregon State and Miami.

Mr. Numb Existence

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	The Wolverine Blog	Michigan		1.00
2	SpartyMSU	Michigan State		1.01
3	Subway Domer	Notre Dame		1.12
4	Not Qualified to Comment	Illinois		1.15
5	The Bull Gator	South Florida		1.16

That's more like it: after a couple weeks in which the Numb Existence Award was horned in on by people following teams that are having, you know, good seasons, we're back to the unrelenting bleah of midwest mediocrity. The Wolverine Blog is your narrow winner, and the first team better than 6-6 or from outside a set of three adjacent states comes in fifth. It's too cold to defy the man up here.

Next we have the Coulter/Kos Award and the Straight Bangin' Award , which are again different sides of the same coin. The CKA and SBA go to the blogs with the highest and lowest bias rating, respectively. Bias rating is calculated by subtracting the blogger's vote for his own team from the poll-wide average. A high number indicates you are shameless homer. A low number indicates that you suffer from an abusive relationship with your football team.

The Coulter/Kos Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	Corn Nation	Nebraska		7.57
2	Eye of a Panther	Pittsburgh		3.53
3	From The Rumble Seat	Georgia Tech		3.24
4	Mountain West Connection	TCU		2.84
5	The Nittany Line	Penn State		2.32

The CK Award needed a pointless 56-yard last-second touchdown in a game that Colorado trailed by 14 to cover. It got it, remarkably, and drove its record against the spread to an improbable 10-3. Straight up it's not quite as rosy at 8-5, but some of those games are things like Iowa-Arkansas State in which a narrow loss straight up is an achievement.

Anyway, Corn Nation is undeterred by the ominous precedents in this space—Nebraska blogpoll voters were personally responsible for at least five of Nebraska's eight turnovers in a loss to Iowa State—and wins this in a landslide, conveniently mere days before the Cornhuskers take on heavily-favored Texas in the Big 12 championship game. Texas is a two-touchdown favorite.

The Straight Bangin' Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	Block C	Clemson		-1.44
2	Husker Mike's Blasphemy	Nebraska		-1.43
3	Block U	Utah		-1.32
4	Conquest Chronicles	Southern Cal		-1.05
5	Gobbler Country	Virginia Tech		-1.00

Slim pickings here, but Block C manages to scrape the award by omitting #25 Clemson entirely. Husker Mike's attempt to give Nebraska some anti-CK mojo going into this weekend narrowly fails, and Block U completes a 1-3 finish in this category for the two "block" blogs in the poll.

Swing is the total change in each ballot from last week to this week (obviously voters who didn't submit a ballot last week are not included). A high number means you are easily distracted by shiny things. A low number means that you're damn sure you're right no matter what reality says.

Mr. Manic-Depressive

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	Roll Bama Roll	Alabama		130
2	Boiled Sports	Purdue		114
3	Braves and Birds	Georgia		110
4	Football Outsiders	Syracuse		110
5	Red and Black Attack	Northern Illinois		108

Roll Bama Roll is hopped up on PCP this week, and understandably since his team managed to scrape by Auburn and put the finishing touches on what was probably the most boring season in the SEC this decade. The ballot starts the chaos at the top by dropping Alabama two spots after the aforementioned scrape and continues all the way down: #14 Clemson, #16 North Carolina, #18 Utah, and #21 Mississippi all deservedly get the axe, and there's a huge surge from everyone below about #13 as a result, with BYU jumping up a whopping ten spots.

Mr. Stubborn

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	mgoblog	Michigan		46
2	Big Red Network	Nebraska		48
3	Lake The Posts	Northwestern		56
4	Burnt Orange Nation	Texas		56
5	ScalpEm.com	Florida State		56

Intrepid mgoblog compatriot Tim wins this thing for the second time this year; Georgia Tech drops only a single spot, Pitt only three, and Oklahoma State only five. Utah and Clemson exit but were already pretty low in Tim's poll.

 

Rank	Team	PPB	StdDev	Delta
1	Alabama (32)	24.1	0.9	--
2	Florida (21)	23.7	1.1	1
3	Texas (15)	23.6	1.0	1
4	TCU (6)	22.2	1.1	--
5	Cincinnati	21.0	0.8	--
6	Boise State	20.0	1.0	--
7	Georgia Tech	18.9	2.3	--
8	Pittsburgh	17.2	1.4	--
9	Oregon	17.0	1.2	--
10	Ohio State	16.4	1.8	--
11	Oklahoma State	13.2	2.6	1
12	Iowa	12.7	3.5	2
13	Penn State	12.0	3.1	2
14	Virginia Tech	11.4	2.9	2
15	Oregon State	9.1	3.6	4
16	Clemson	9.0	3.7	2
17	Miami (Florida)	7.6	3.0	3
18	LSU	6.7	3.8	7
19	Southern Cal	5.5	3.5	2
20	Brigham Young	5.3	4.9	2
21	Utah	4.9	4.3	2
22	North Carolina	4.3	3.7	3
23	California	4.0	3.3	3
24	Houston	3.9	4.0	--
25	Mississippi	3.3	3.4	1

Also Receiving Votes: Stanford(3.0), Nebraska(1.9), Wisconsin(0.7), Navy(0.6), Arizona(0.4), Temple(0.3), Northwestern(0.3), Central Michigan(0.3), Georgia(0.2), Texas Tech(0.2), West Virginia(0.1), Nevada(0.1), Arkansas(0.1), Syracuse(0.0),

Total Ballots: 74

Votes by blog here , votes by team here .

An extremely quiet week, with on-field events providing little in the way of reason to shake things up. LSU plummets after Les Miles' clock management fiasco and Stanford and Wisconsin drop out after suffering upsets; other than that the only thing of note is Florida barely edging past Texas for the #2 spot that will be moot after the SEC championship game.

Justify Your Existence

This is pretty much the same as last week: this is the only poll willing to move Florida off its pedestal and the only one that gets the order of Iowa and Penn State correct.

Wack Ballot Watchdog

Boiled Sports has a beef :

In an example of how stupid AP voters are, Stanford dropped out of their poll with a close loss to Cal in their rivalry game. So Stanford loses to a now-ranked Cal team, and falls from 14th to out of the polls. Yet the team they rolled 55-21 (USC) last week remains ranked. Seriously, this is an abomination. I kept Stanford in the poll because losing a close game to your rival -- who is also pretty good -- should not be penalized that harshly.

Er… well… it's not just the AP. And I think BS has a point: Stanford is 7-4 but against a very difficult schedule that has just one nonconference tomato-can on it. They've played a ton of losable games and have excellent wins over Oregon and USC. Surely that's more deserving than Utah, which has one win over a BCS team and that's Louisville, or Ole Miss, which may have just beaten LSU but only has three losses mostly because the nonconference schedule is Memphis, SE Louisiana, UAB, and Northern Arizona. This is a prime example of schedule strength not being taken into account enough; Stanford might not be a top 15 team but they probably should be somewhere in the poll.

Now on to the extracurriculars. First up are the teams which spur the most disagreement between voters as measured by standard deviation.

Most Disagreement

#	Team	StdDev
1	Brigham Young	4.9
2	Utah	4.3
3	Houston	4.0
4	Stanford	3.8
5	LSU	3.8

And the universe is back to normal: mid-majors dominate here.

Ballot Math

First up are "Mr. Bold" and "Mr. Numb Existence." The former goes to the voter with the ballot most divergent from the poll at large. The number you see is the average difference between a person's opinion of a team and the poll's opinion.

Mr. Bold

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	Dan Shanoff	Florida		3.36
2	Hey Jenny Slater	Georgia		3.21
3	Red and Black Attack	Northern Illinois		2.97
4	Let's Go Rockets	Toledo		2.91
5	BCS Guru	UCLA		2.91

Dan Shanoff has the week's most bat-crap poll of all and how did this guy not win the most manic-depressive ballot below, too? Utah, who has beaten zero teams of relevance and just got shellacked by TCU, flies up 11 spots to #11. Ole Miss flies up 11 spots to #14. Cal up ten spots. Iowa and Penn State down at 20 and 21, down 6 and five spots, respectively, after 1) a 12-0 shutout and 2) a 42-14 waxing. Shanoff, for his part… says nothing ! Arrrgh.

Mr. Numb Existence

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	Buffs.tv	Colorado		0.98
2	Bama Sports Report	Alabama		1.07
3	Atomic Teeth	Missouri		1.09
4	The Bull Gator	Florida		1.10
5	WSU Football Blog	Washington State		1.11

Alabama and Florida blogs break up this award's recent run of top fives consisting exclusively of dull-eyed bloggers watching their teams soldier through miserable years; this may be because several of these teams have finished their seasons and the crushing weight of ennui is lifted. (No, this isn't about me. Yes it is.)

Anyway: Colorado blog Buffs.tv has the most macro-ish poll and manages to get the average error under one point, but there's still no consensus at the top and a perfect ballot is not on the way.

Next we have the Coulter/Kos Award and the Straight Bangin' Award , which are again different sides of the same coin. The CKA and SBA go to the blogs with the highest and lowest bias rating, respectively. Bias rating is calculated by subtracting the blogger's vote for his own team from the poll-wide average. A high number indicates you are shameless homer. A low number indicates that you suffer from an abusive relationship with your football team.

The Coulter/Kos Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	Corn Nation	Nebraska		5.15
2	California Golden Blogs	California		3.96
3	The Nittany Line	Penn State		2.97
4	RazorBloggers	Arkansas		2.89
5	Fantasy College Blitz	Oklahoma State		2.82

Bah: Minnesota's miserable offense defied the CK Award last week as ten-point favorite Iowa beat the Gophers 12-0; the award is still an impressive 9-3 against the spread and 8-4 straight up.

This week it's another repeat offender tempting fate, as Nebraska—which escaped punishment thanks to a bye week before the horrendous, eight-turnover Iowa State game—finds itself under the gun for a second week. The Cornhusker's traditional Thanksgiving weekend rivalry game against Colorado is on the docket; Nebraska is favored by ten.

The Straight Bangin' Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	Anton Azucar	Miami (Florida)		-3.55
2	CollegeGameBalls	Virginia Tech		-2.42
3	Gobbler Country	Virginia Tech		-2.42
4	Husker Mike's Blasphemy	Nebraska		-1.85
5	Dan Shanoff	Florida		-0.69

More Virginia Tech hangover is beaten out by Miami (That Miami) blogger Anton Azucar's skepticism about the 'Canes after a narrow escape against Duke. Which… yeah, I get that, man.

Swing is the total change in each ballot from last week to this week (obviously voters who didn't submit a ballot last week are not included). A high number means you are easily distracted by shiny things. A low number means that you're damn sure you're right no matter what reality says.

Mr. Manic-Depressive

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	Dawg Sports	Georgia		104
2	Roll Bama Roll	Alabama		102
3	All Pac 10	Washington State		100
4	Dan Shanoff	Florida		96
5	Falcon Nation	Bowling Green		90

The chaos in Dawg Sports 's ballot is impressive given the relative lack of thunderous on-field events. In addition to the usual array of stuff that make sense, Houston and Oklahoma State plummet, Pitt and Georgia Tech move up three spots each, and Wisconsin goes from #13 to out.

Mr. Stubborn

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	The Nittany Line	Penn State		30
2	Testudo Times	Maryland		36
3	Let's Go Rockets	Toledo		40
4	Orange::44	Syracuse		40
5	Big Red Network	Nebraska		44

In a week that saw little movement overall, The Nittany Line surpasses all thanks to kindness towards Wisconsin (down only five after a loss to Northwestern) and skepticism towards Stanford, which did not appear in last week's poll and doesn't have to get dropped as a result.

 

Rank	Team	PPB	StdDev	Delta
1	Alabama (35)	24.1	0.8	1
2	Texas (21)	23.8	0.9	1
3	Florida (26)	23.7	1.1	2
4	TCU (3)	22.0	1.1	--
5	Cincinnati	21.0	0.7	--
6	Boise State	20.0	1.2	--
7	Georgia Tech	19.1	1.0	--
8	Pittsburgh	17.2	1.6	--
9	Oregon	16.0	1.5	1
10	Ohio State	16.0	1.8	2
11	LSU	15.5	2.1	2
12	Oklahoma State	12.4	2.8	6
13	Stanford	11.0	3.8	13
14	Iowa	11.0	3.7	1
15	Penn State	10.8	3.5	4
16	Virginia Tech	9.1	3.6	4
17	Wisconsin	8.5	3.6	4
18	Clemson	7.0	3.7	6
19	Oregon State	5.5	3.6	6
20	Miami (Florida)	5.4	2.9	6
21	Southern Cal	4.8	3.4	10
22	Brigham Young	4.4	4.3	--
23	Utah	3.9	3.4	7
24	Houston	3.4	3.6	9
25	North Carolina	1.8	2.6	1

Also Receiving Votes: Arizona(1.6), Rutgers(1.4), California(1.0), Nebraska(0.9), Navy(0.7), West Virginia(0.4), Oklahoma(0.3), Temple(0.2), Mississippi(0.2), Boston College(0.2), Central Michigan(0.2), Washington(0.1), Northwestern(0.1), Nevada(0.1), Texas Tech(0.1), Arkansas(0.0), South Florida(0.0),

Total Ballots: 85

Votes by blog here , votes by team here .

There is not longer any controversy about whether USC should be higher than Oregon, eh? I'm not sure if the Blogpoll should thank Stanford for making the point so emphatically or curse them for removing what was sure to be a weeks-long abomination. In any case, they make a huge leap from unranked to #13—virtually unprecedented this late in the season—and USC slides all the way to #21.

Elsewhere, Florida's taken a back seat again after another meh performance against questionable competition, sliding from #1 to #3 in the weekly carousel of things that don't matter at the top of the polls. Alabama reasserts their claim to the top spot.

The rest is pretty static.

Justify Your Existence

All three major polls maintain their season-long coronation of Florida, so the Blogpoll is once again different at the very top. From there many differences have been ironed out by events on the field, but there remains one major win for bloggers versus the mainstream guys this week: the poll above manages to slot Iowa, its head to head win, and its vastly superior resume ahead of Penn State, whereas the other major polls have the Nittany Lions two or three spots in front of the Hawkeyes.

Other items:

• Relative to the coaches, bloggers love Miami and Stanford, both of whom are up four slots…
• …and they hate Penn State, Wisconsin, and BYU. The former two are down three, the latter down four.

Wack Ballot Watchdog

Our TCU #1 votes spread like weeds, with Dan Shanoff and Tilting at Windmills  being joined by Block U . Block U witnessed a first-hand demolition, so that makes sense. The other two guys still don't provide much, if any, reasoning for their placement. Shanoff does hit on a good point , though:

I'm going to give TCU a lot of credit for thumping Utah -- it's a more quality win than any Texas will have this season (certainly more than any Texas will finish with).

Texas's best win will be against Oklahoma, a team that lost to BYU, who Utah killed.

Other items:

• Why is Syracuse blog Orange::44 voting Northwestern #17 ? Northwestern lost to Syracuse! If there's any blog on the planet that has seen Northwestern's status as a non top-25 team up close and personal it's Orange::44. That's the only NU vote in the poll.
• Elsewhere in weird single votes, Maryland blog Around The Harbor  goes for South Florida at #24 . And Mizzourah  must be joking with 3-7 Washington #15 .
• Every week some guy votes Oklahoma up high for reasons unknown; this time it's Rocky Top Talk  shooting them up to #15 .
• Bruce Ciskie  has West Virginia #13 , five slots higher than any other voter and that's just one guy in a poll consisting of mostly ballots on which WVU is unranked.
• Iowa gets votes in every slot from 8 to 25, and Miami is somewhere from 14 to 24 except definitely not 17th. We are in agreement that Miami is not the 17th best team in the country.

 

Now on to the extracurriculars. First up are the teams which spur the most disagreement between voters as measured by standard deviation.

Most Disagreement

#	Team	StdDev
1	Brigham Young	4.3
2	Stanford	3.8
3	Clemson	3.7
4	Iowa	3.7
5	Wisconsin	3.6

BYU is your default victor, as a mid-major in the teens almost always is. Stanford shoots up into the "where do I put these guys?" range, which is better than their previous "not in the poll" range.

Ballot Math

First up are "Mr. Bold" and "Mr. Numb Existence." The former goes to the voter with the ballot most divergent from the poll at large. The number you see is the average difference between a person's opinion of a team and the poll's opinion.

Mr. Bold

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	Black Heart Gold Pants	Iowa		3.29
2	Let's Go Rockets	Toledo		3.00
3	Rocky Top Talk	Tennessee		2.93
4	Orange::44	Syracuse		2.89
5	Hey Jenny Slater	Georgia		2.76

This isn't a huge number at the top of of the list here and the corresponding ballot isn't too crazy, but it does display a distinct Big Ten bias—OSU up three, Iowa up five, Penn State up four from actual poll positions—and hates on Georgia Tech for some reason. New poll darling Stanford is provided admission only grudgingly, as they check in at #23, and BHGP's season-long LSU hating continues.

Mr. Numb Existence

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1t	The Wolverine Blog	Michigan		0.91
1t	WSU Football Blog	Washington State		0.91
3	Card Chronicle	Louisville		0.96
4	My Opinion on Sports	Oklahoma		1.03
5	Michigan Sports Center	Michigan		1.06

The season-long theme here holds: the award for a numb existence is exclusively populated by dull-eyed football zombies looking forward to the season's end, with Michigan and Washington State blogs tying for the win and Louisville, Oklahoma, and Michigan (again) rounding out the list. Let this be an unofficial account of fan misery.

This year is not good for perfect ballots since there's so much disagreement at the top that we haven't gotten past spot two for a while.

Next we have the Coulter/Kos Award and the Straight Bangin' Award , which are again different sides of the same coin. The CKA and SBA go to the blogs with the highest and lowest bias rating, respectively. Bias rating is calculated by subtracting the blogger's vote for his own team from the poll-wide average. A high number indicates you are shameless homer. A low number indicates that you suffer from an abusive relationship with your football team.

The Coulter/Kos Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	Black Heart Gold Pants	Iowa		5.96
2	Beat Visitor	Rutgers		5.62
3	The Nittany Line	Penn State		3.20
4	Fantasy College Blitz	Oklahoma State		2.62
5	Mountain West Connection	TCU		2.05

The CK Award continued its run of mayhem, condemning Utah to a 55-28 defeat by TCU and running its record on the season to 9-2 against the spread and 8-3 straight up.

This week's whammy falls to Iowa, again, as Black Heart, Gold Pants ranks the Hawkeyes 9th. In Iowa's first go-round as the CK Award curse recipient, they narrowly avoided a loss against Arkansas State in a game that ended 24-21. We might see something similar when the Hawkeyes close their season against terrible Minnesota. Iowa is a ten-point favorite.

The Straight Bangin' Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	CollegeGameBalls	Virginia Tech		-4.14
2	Conquest Chronicles	Southern Cal		-2.84
3	Gobbler Country	Virginia Tech		-2.14
4	Dan Shanoff	Florida		-1.73
5	Anton Azucar	Miami (Florida)		-1.44

Virginia Tech and College Game Balls  continue their run at the top of this category, with the winning ballot placing VT #21. Odd to see Dan Shanoff in here since the Gators should be locked into everyone's top three, but Shanoff is one of our TCU voters and this bumps the Gators down to #4.

Swing is the total change in each ballot from last week to this week (obviously voters who didn't submit a ballot last week are not included). A high number means you are easily distracted by shiny things. A low number means that you're damn sure you're right no matter what reality says.

Mr. Manic-Depressive

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	Block U	Utah		156
2	Over the Pylon	Ball State		150
3	Tilting at WindMills	Oklahoma		138
4	Dan Shanoff	Florida		136
5	Subway Domer	Notre Dame		136

Whee! Block U  is fed up with this crazy world and is turning it upside down. USC: out. Miami (That Miami): out. Arizona: out. Houston and Utah: not quite out but seriously thinking about out. And the award-winning coup de grace: Florida down five from #1 to #6. That extra bit of poll wandering is the winning margin.

Mr. Stubborn

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1t	Buffs.tv	Colorado		72
1t	From Old Virginia	Virginia		72
1t	mgoblog	Michigan		72
1t	Big Red Network	Nebraska		72
5	Foul Balls	Notre Dame		76

A four-way tie at the top and a number as high as 72 means that this category isn't flagging any super-weird ballots, as all these categories are designed to do, and the general snark has been suspended for this category.

 

Rank	Team	PPB	StdDev	Delta
1	Florida (32)	24.0	0.8	--
2	Alabama (37)	24.0	1.0	1
3	Texas (24)	23.8	0.9	1
4	TCU (1)	21.4	1.0	1
5	Cincinnati	21.3	0.8	1
6	Boise State	20.0	1.4	1
7	Georgia Tech	18.9	1.3	3
8	Pittsburgh	15.8	2.8	5
9	LSU	14.6	3.4	--
10	Oregon	14.2	2.6	2
11	Southern Cal	13.9	2.4	1
12	Ohio State	13.8	2.9	4
13	Iowa	13.5	3.8	7
14	Miami (Florida)	13.3	3.0	1
15	Houston	12.4	3.4	1
16	Utah	10.1	4.7	1
17	Arizona	8.6	3.0	1
18	Oklahoma State	7.8	2.9	1
19	Penn State	7.5	3.4	8
20	Virginia Tech	5.3	3.6	3
21	Wisconsin	4.6	2.8	3
22	Brigham Young	2.9	2.9	3
23	South Florida	2.6	2.7	3
24	Clemson	2.4	2.6	2
25	Oregon State	2.2	2.7	1

Also Receiving Votes: Stanford(2.0), West Virginia(1.2), Auburn(0.7), Texas Tech(0.5), Navy(0.4), Tennessee(0.2), Boston College(0.2), Temple(0.1), Nebraska(0.1), Rutgers(0.1), North Carolina(0.1), Central Michigan(0.1), Arkansas(0.1), Oklahoma(0.1), California(0.1), Troy(0.0), Mississippi(0.0), Northwestern(0.0), Kansas State(0.0), Notre Dame(0.0), Idaho(0.0),

Total Ballots: 94

Votes by blog here , votes by team here .

It remains tight at the top, with Florida pulling in the most first place votes but losing out by a tiny margin to Alabama—I know the software says it's a tie, but Alabama has a couple more points than the Gators. Texas drops a slot but is basically in a dead heat with the two SEC powers, and then there's a dropoff.

But all that is window-dressing. The main event:

Justify Your Existence

Unlike the Coaches, Harris, and AP polls, Oregon is in front of a team they housed by 27 two weeks ago and shares the same record they do. Elsewhere, Oregon is as many as six spots behind Trojan royalty. Here, they are in front, albeit by an uncomfortably small margin.

That is all. The Blogpoll wins. I give up: we should use it for the BCS now. Yes, even though some people are clearly insane—as we'll see in the next section—the net has consistently made more sense than any of the other major polls.

Wack Ballot Watchdog

Your wack TCU voter is Tilting at Windmills . No explanation is given.

Other items:

• Right, USC above Oregon : many, many voters did this. If you are one of them, please review "47-20" kthx. You have not put enough thought into your ballots.
• On the other hand, Saurian Sagacity drops USC four spots for an ugly win over Arizona State and now has them nine slots behind Ohio State .
• This one is about as bad as putting USC above Oregon: at least a few voters have Iowa underneath Arizona, a team they beat by two scores and has a shiny loss to Washington on their resume to go with no win as impressive as Penn State. Dan Shanoff , Tilting at Windmills , and Braves & Birds all come in for scolding, especially because not one of them even mentioned Arizona's position relative to the Hawkeyes in this week's ballot.
• Toledo blog Let's Go Rockets has BYU #12 , six spots higher than any other voter.
• Navy gets a ton of "thanks for beating Notre Dame " #25 votes.
• Husker Mike will not be dissuaded from voting for Oklahoma ! They can lose to Baylor and Husker Mike will manage to jam them in at #25! They can go 3-9 and Husker Mike will hack the system so that his ballot goes to 75 teams!

Now on to the extracurriculars. First up are the teams which spur the most disagreement between voters as measured by standard deviation.

Most Disagreement

#	Team	StdDev
1	Utah	4.7
2	Iowa	3.8
3	Virginia Tech	3.6
4	Penn State	3.4
5	Houston	3.4

Oklahoma finally relinquishes the top spot here by virtue of a loss to Nebraska that finally knocks them out of ballots entirely. Utah, #16 without having done much of anything other than lose to Oregon, is a strong replacement. Check out their team profile : they get at least three votes in every slot from 8 to 24 save three.

Ballot Math

First up are "Mr. Bold" and "Mr. Numb Existence." The former goes to the voter with the ballot most divergent from the poll at large. The number you see is the average difference between a person's opinion of a team and the poll's opinion.

Mr. Bold

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	Tomahawk Nation	Florida State		3.65
2	Eagle in Atlanta	Boston College		3.19
3	Clone Chronicles	Iowa State		2.98
4	Let's Go Rockets	Toledo		2.94
5	Braves and Birds	Georgia		2.74

Tomahawk Nation is your winner here for some serious ACC bias: GT is #4, Miami (That Miami) #7, Clemson #13, and VT #14. That's three, seven, eleven, and six spots higher than the rest of the poll has them. Boise languishes at #10—which I get if you're putting a lot of emphasis on strength of schedule—and the Big Ten languishes, as does LSU.

Irritatingly, TN appears to have not posted the ballot, let alone attempt to explain the ACC slant to it.

Mr. Numb Existence

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	WSU Football Blog	Washington State		0.93
2	Mizzourah	Missouri		1.10
3	Beat Visitor	Rutgers		1.12
4	Not Qualified to Comment	Illinois		1.18
5	Michigan Sports Center	Michigan		1.18

Yea, truly, the Mr. Numb Existence award has devolved to the teams that cause so much pain for their fans that all they can do when it comes time to put some teams in a top twenty-five is dully click the "chalk" button before moving on to the next pointless exercise in their meaningless lives. Rutgers is headed for a decent bowl, but other than that it's Worst BCS Team, Biggest Dropoff From Last Year To This Year, Most Disappointing BCS Team, Team That Lost To Most Disappointing BCS Team.

I should probably rename this category WHISKEY.

Next we have the Coulter/Kos Award and the Straight Bangin' Award , which are again different sides of the same coin. The CKA and SBA go to the blogs with the highest and lowest bias rating, respectively. Bias rating is calculated by subtracting the blogger's vote for his own team from the poll-wide average. A high number indicates you are shameless homer. A low number indicates that you suffer from an abusive relationship with your football team.

The Coulter/Kos Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	Block U	Utah		7.88
2	FNF Magazine: The Blog	South Florida		7.45
3	Black Heart Gold Pants	Iowa		5.52
4	We Will Always Have Tempe	Ohio State		5.16
5	Eleven Warriors	Ohio State		4.16

This thing has always been sort of creepy, but last week it went from sort of creepy to officially creepy as hell: Notre Dame lost to two-touchdown underdog Navy despite not punting because of redzone turnovers and a last-minute safety on what was attempting to be another game-tying last-ditch drive. The CK Award, picked up by Subway Domer last week, may have ended Charlie Weis's tenure as Notre Dame's head coach.

The CK Award is now 8-2 against the spread and 7-3 straight up. The last two weeks it's killed heavy favorites West Virginia and Notre Dame against lesser competition. Fear the CK.

This week's whammy falls to Utah. This probably the first time in the history of the award—at least the first time since I've been tracking the thing's creepy power—that the winner is a three-score underdog, but it is so: TCU is favored by a whopping 20 points this weekend.

The Straight Bangin' Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	CollegeGameBalls	Virginia Tech		-4.34
2	NittanyWhiteOut	Penn State		-3.46
3	The Lions Den	Penn State		-2.46
4	Gobbler Country	Virginia Tech		-1.34
5	The Smoking Musket	West Virginia		-1.20

This award sees a return of its previous tradition: disappointed powers overrating how bad their team is after a crushing loss. Hi, Penn State. It'll be okay.

But your winners here—and your #4 finisher—are Virginia Tech fans, who may be coming off a win but it's a 16-3 win against East Carolina and is nothing to write home about. The lingering stench of giving North Carolina its first ACC victory is enough for College Game Balls to stick the Hokies down at #25, giving them a decent-sized win.

Swing is the total change in each ballot from last week to this week (obviously voters who didn't submit a ballot last week are not included). A high number means you are easily distracted by shiny things. A low number means that you're damn sure you're right no matter what reality says.

Mr. Manic-Depressive

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	Eagle in Atlanta	Boston College		138
2	Corn Nation	Nebraska		114
3	Gate 21	Tennessee		112
4	Braves and Birds	Georgia		110
5	TheUConnBlog	Connecticut		110

When you drop a team that went from 9-0 to 9-1 entirely out of your poll, and eject a couple other teams for no particular reason and totally hammer Penn State and LSU for losing against excellent competition… you win this easily. Eagle In Atlanta's had enough of this Iowa crap : the Hawkeyes plummet from #8 to entirely out of the poll, falling behind Penn State, who Iowa beat and has a better record than.

Surely this is an error, right?

Mr. Stubborn

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	Anton Azucar	Miami (Florida)		50
2	Michigan Sports Center	Michigan		52
3	Beat Visitor	Rutgers		52
4	The Nittany Line	Penn State		54
5	Foul Balls	Notre Dame		56

Miami blogger Anton Azucar narrowly edges out the field here thanks to existing skepticism over Oklahoma and Notre Dame (dropping out of the poll from 21 and 23, respectively) and kindness towards Iowa, down only four after losing to Northwestern this weekend.

 

Rank	Team	PPB	StdDev	Delta
1	Florida (33)	24.1	0.8	1
2	Texas (34)	23.9	1.1	1
3	Alabama (20)	23.6	1.1	2
4	Cincinnati	20.6	1.5	--
5	TCU	20.1	1.8	1
6	Iowa	20.1	1.9	1
7	Boise State	19.8	1.6	--
8	Oregon	18.9	1.5	1
9	LSU	16.8	1.8	1
10	Georgia Tech	16.2	1.3	1
11	Penn State	15.0	1.8	1
12	Southern Cal	12.6	2.0	4
13	Pittsburgh	12.1	2.4	2
14	Houston	11.5	2.8	2
15	Miami (Florida)	10.3	2.9	2
16	Ohio State	9.8	2.4	2
17	Utah	9.0	3.6	2
18	Arizona	7.0	2.9	4
19	Oklahoma State	6.3	3.0	5
20	Notre Dame	4.9	3.1	4
21	California	4.4	2.7	5
22	Oklahoma	4.3	4.0	1
23	Virginia Tech	3.7	3.3	10
24	Wisconsin	3.6	2.6	2
25	Brigham Young	1.8	2.5	1

Also Receiving Votes: South Florida(1.7), Clemson(0.6), Texas Tech(0.4), West Virginia(0.3), Auburn(0.2), Oregon State(0.2), Rutgers(0.2), Mississippi(0.1), Tennessee(0.1), Troy(0.1), Duke(0.1), Temple(0.1), Boston College(0.1), Central Michigan(0.1), Idaho(0.0), Arkansas(0.0), Nebraska(0.0), North Carolina(0.0), South Carolina(0.0),

Total Ballots: 87

Votes by blog here , votes by team here .

Bad week to have a bye for Alabama. The Tide sat idle as it watched its two main competitors for #1 pound opponents and dropped behind both of them. Seeing their marquee nonconference win get pounded and fall out of the ACC title race once and for all didn't help, either.

As a result: there is a new #1. It is the old #1, Florida, but now Texas actually has more first-place votes. The margins are so small here that the poll could see more shifts as the season steams towards a conclusion, assuming the top three keep winning.

Elsewhere, Oregon is still locked into the spot directly behind Boise State because of their opening-weekend loss; I wonder if there's anything Oregon can do the rest of the season that would see them leap the Broncos. Stanford, Arizona State, Arizona, and Oregon State are all at least decent, and Arizona is enjoying a top-20 ranking at the moment. Boise will finish out against WAC opponents. At what point does strength of schedule overcome a head-to-head loss?

Justify Your Existence

The Blogpoll falls back into the same order at the top that the other polls have with the Alabama decline, which is unfortunate for hey-we're-cool purposes but the right move given the events of the weekend. And things are beginning to calcify as other polls take "the season that his happening" into account, reducing the variance between the bloggers and others. Major differences this week between the Coaches' and bloggers:

• Cinci is #4 here, #7 there, behind Iowa, Boise, and TCU.
• Ohio State is #16 here, #12 there.

There are a bunch of other one and two slot disagreements; we're down to just two major outliers.

Wack Ballot Watchdog

No weird #1s so just bullets:

• Weird votes late in the ballot: Husker Mike goes for Arkansas , a 4-4 team that's 1-4 in the SEC, #22. Tar Heel Mania is the only voter going for CMU after their solid loss to BC, and he's got them #20. And I think this is a first in blogpoll history: a trio of non-ironic votes for Duke. Which Duke may well deserve.
• The single most hateful vote in the poll is Black Heart, Gold Pants dropping LSU down to #19, which is seven spots worse than any other voter ranked the Tigers. That seems mighty hypocritical given Iowa's status as another team with a pretty record that's lived on the edge this fall and their spot—third—on the BHGP ballot. Show us on the doll, BHGP.
• The single most insane Cupid moment in the poll is The Daily Gopher's continued romance with Ole Miss . The Rebels are now 2-3 in the SEC after a 13-point loss to Auburn and their best nonconference win is UAB. Two voters slide them in #25; TDG still has them #15. They drop only two slots after their latest uncompetitive loss.
• Penn State has folk ranking them #5 or #6 and then as low as #18 .
• Northern Illinois blog Red and Black Attack has a bit of a mid-major fetish : TCU #2 and Boise shoots up to #3 after Oregon's win. This displaces Florida and Alabama, which find themselves lower on this ballot than any other in the poll. Texas is #1.
• No, I don't get why Oklahoma is high up on a bunch of ballots . 5-3 with best win Kansas, loss against BYU looking uglier every week, okay you kept it close against some good teams… this is not a top 15 team right now except for the name recognition.

Now on to the extracurriculars. First up are the teams which spur the most and least disagreement between voters as measured by standard deviation. Note that the standard deviation charts halt at #25 when looking for the lowest, otherwise teams that everyone agreed were terrible (say, Eastern Michigan) would all be at the top.

Most Disagreement

#	Team	StdDev
1	Oklahoma	4.0
2	Utah	3.6
3	Virginia Tech	3.3
4	Notre Dame	3.1
5	Oklahoma State	3.0

Oklahoma is officially this year's most confusing team, as they've been at or near the top of this category ever since Sam Branford's shoulder exploded.

Ballot Math

First up are "Mr. Bold" and "Mr. Numb Existence." The former goes to the voter with the ballot most divergent from the poll at large. The number you see is the average difference between a person's opinion of a team and the poll's opinion.

Mr. Bold

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	Black Heart Gold Pants	Iowa		3.25
2	Husker Mike's Blasphemy	Nebraska		3.04
3	The Daily Gopher	Minnesota		2.64
4	And The Valley Shook!	LSU		2.58
5	Hey Jenny Slater	Georgia		2.55

BHGP wrests this award back from Husker Mike in the race to become king of weird late-season ballots. Reasons why include :

• Super Big Ten hurray forever . Three Big Ten teams are wildly overrated relative to the rest of the poll: #3 Iowa, #6 Penn State, and #16 Wisconsin.
• Les Miles did something horrible to me . LSU is #19.
• I hate fun, and Houston . Georgia Tech is #14. Houston languishes at #20.

It's not a super-weird ballot. I've seen more bizarre ones.

Mr. Numb Existence

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	Around the Harbor	Maryland		0.81
2	Not Qualified to Comment	Illinois		0.88
3	Michigan Sports Center	Michigan		0.94
4	Double Extra Point	Nebraska		1.08
5	The Lions Den	Penn State		1.17

A Washington State blog numbly punched in a chalk ballot last week and returned to his doctor-recommended diet of whiskey and gravel; this week it's Around the Harbor , a Maryland blog, executing the same trudge towards oblivion/the end of the season. Note that the next three blogs here are not exactly enjoying stellar seasons.

The perfect ballot quest is still a long way off with all this chaos at the top: Around The Harbor doesn't get past #2 Alabama before he's got a disagreement with the poll at large.

Next we have the Coulter/Kos Award and the Straight Bangin' Award , which are again different sides of the same coin. The CKA and SBA go to the blogs with the highest and lowest bias rating, respectively. Bias rating is calculated by subtracting the blogger's vote for his own team from the poll-wide average. A high number indicates you are shameless homer. A low number indicates that you suffer from an abusive relationship with your football team.

The Coulter/Kos Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	Subway Domer	Notre Dame		5.06
2	Block U	Utah		3.98
3	The Lions Den	Penn State		2.97
4	Black Heart Gold Pants	Iowa		2.92
5	Mountain West Connection	TCU		2.90

The CK Award claimed another victim, as two-time-consecutive winner West Virginia could not escape the whammy this week, falling in a weird Friday night game against USF despite being favored. The CK Award is now 7-2 against the spread this year and 6-3 straight up, with one of those losses being Arkansas State at Iowa. It is uncanny.

With the West Virginia folk dropping out of the way, Subway Domer ascends to the top of the list after weeks of hanging around in second or third as he watched the Irish come down to the final play against anyone better than Washington State. It's too bad the now extremely interesting game at Pitt is next week; this week Notre Dame has traditional rival-type-substance Navy. Notre Dame is favored by 11.

The Straight Bangin' Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	CollegeGameBalls	Virginia Tech		-3.75
2	California Golden Blogs	California		-1.37
3	Dan Shanoff	Florida		-1.14
4	And The Valley Shook!	LSU		-0.77
5	Roll Bama Roll	Alabama		-0.60

Finally we see the return of this category's long-running theme: my team lost and disappointed me so I will show them by ranking them lower than everyone else. This week's winner and the only guy to get above a slot or two is College Game Balls , which reacts to the end of Virginia Tech's ACC run by totally omitting the Hokies from his poll.

Swing is the total change in each ballot from last week to this week (obviously voters who didn't submit a ballot last week are not included). A high number means you are easily distracted by shiny things. A low number means that you're damn sure you're right no matter what reality says.

Mr. Manic-Depressive

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	Roll Bama Roll	Alabama		120
2	Over the Pylon	Ball State		118
3	Corn Nation	Nebraska		106
4	Husker Mike's Blasphemy	Nebraska		106
5	The Joe Cribbs Car Wash	Auburn		102

Chaos is getting significantly reduced, with Alabama blog Roll Bama Roll taking this with a relatively low number. There's a significant amount of movement on the ballot, with a bad bet on CMU (previously #16) and excessive faith in Oklahoma State and VaTech, coupled with strong reactions to those folk losing, are the difference.

Mr. Stubborn

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1t	Rocky Top Talk	Tennessee		50
1t	mgoblog	Michigan		50
3	One Bronco Nation Under God	Boise State		52
4	Clone Chronicles	Iowa State		52
5	The Nittany Line	Penn State		56

A tie at the top featuring Rocky Top Talk and MGoBlog , my home site. This is the second time Tim has won the Mr. Stubborn award this year. I will have a talk with him that he will not listen to, evidently. Reasons for victory here are mostly leaving Oklahoma State and VT rather high (they drop only two and four slots, respectively), which is enough for the slight edge that got him the award. Very strange to see a ballot on which 80% of the teams move winning here.

As far as RTT goes, it's similar: Oklahoma State and VT drop only six spots btween them and everyone else moves around a little bit but not much. WVU doesn't even slide out of the poll, sticking in at #21.

 

Rank	Team	PPB	StdDev	Delta
1	Alabama (46)	24.2	0.9	--
2	Florida (24)	23.9	0.9	--
3	Texas (17)	23.4	1.2	--
4	Cincinnati	20.4	1.9	--
5	Iowa (2)	20.3	2.1	--
6	TCU (2)	19.8	2.1	2
7	Boise State	19.2	2.0	--
8	Southern Cal	19.1	2.1	2
9	Oregon	16.2	1.8	2
10	LSU	16.2	2.1	--
11	Georgia Tech	15.6	1.6	1
12	Penn State	13.7	2.2	1
13	Virginia Tech	12.2	2.1	1
14	Oklahoma State	12.2	2.4	1
15	Pittsburgh	9.7	2.7	3
16	Houston	9.5	3.2	1
17	Miami (Florida)	8.7	2.9	8
18	Ohio State	7.3	2.9	2
19	Utah	6.3	3.4	--
20	West Virginia	5.8	2.7	2
21	South Carolina	4.6	2.7	2
22	Arizona	4.3	2.8	4
23	Oklahoma	2.8	3.5	3
24	Notre Dame	2.6	3.0	2
25	Mississippi	2.1	2.9	1

Also Receiving Votes: Central Michigan(1.7), California(1.1), Brigham Young(0.7), Wisconsin(0.5), Clemson(0.2), Kansas(0.2), Navy(0.1), Arkansas(0.1), Texas Tech(0.1), Oregon State(0.1), Georgia(0.0), Central Florida(0.0), Troy(0.0), South Florida(0.0), Rutgers(0.0), Connecticut(0.0),

Total Ballots: 91

Votes by blog here , votes by team here .

Iffy performances by both SEC powerhouses, with Alabama's being considerably iffier, see first-place votes shift away from the formerly dominant Tide to Florida, Texas, Iowa, and even TCU. Alabama still maintains its grip on #1, and there's no danger of anyone in the top three falling out without a loss: after Texas's 23.4 points per ballot the next team in the poll, Cincinnati, is a full three points back.

Elsewhere it's fairly boring, with Miami taking a tumble for its loss to Clemson and the back end of the poll getting wiped out and replaced with poll debutant Arizona and a few other teams who've hopped in and out this season.

Justify Your Existence

The AP poll's one-week dalliance with Alabama #1 came to an end, leaving the Blogpoll the only poll in all the land with Alabama #1. The other striking feature of the blogpoll is its wish to hurt USC. USC is #8 here and  #4 in the AP/Coaches poll. If Texas eats it and Cincinnati or Iowa  go undefeated this poll may have a different opinion of who should play for the national title than the actual polls do.

Wack Ballot Watchdog

Now that the #1 votes are spreading out from their status last week (overwhelmingly Alabama with some Florida stragglers and one or two folks going for Texas), let's focus on the arguments for the outlying #1 votes. Two voters went for TCU. Irritatingly, Dan Shanoff provides no explanation other than "TCU!" and Tilting at Windmills doesn't even go that far. Lame.

The lack of explanation is probably because there just isn't one unless the only football game you saw this year is TCU-BYU. TCU's beaten Virginia solidly and Clemson narrowly, escaped from Air Force by three, and then clobbered BYU, which I'll remind you is something that Florida State has done this year. This is a nice resume, definitely a top 15 team. It doesn't come close to beating out those of Florida, Alabama, Iowa, and even Texas.

Two others went for Iowa, citing the Hawkeye's excellent strength of schedule thanks to its fortune with Arizona and sudden bowl-threat Iowa State. Dawg Sports :

The Iowa Hawkeyes earned the top spot on my ballot, in spite of their narrow escapes against Arkansas State and Division I-AA Northern Iowa, because their six triumphs over teams at or above .500 include solid victories over the 17th-ranked Penn St. Nittany Lions and the 21st-ranked Arizona Wildcats , as well as wins of moderate quality against the likes of the Wisconsin Badgers and the now slightly less wholly unworthy Iowa St. Cyclones .

Dr. Saturday … well, Dr. Saturday does not have his poll post up right now. But I'm sure when he does it will have similar justifications based on strength of schedule that will get weaker as the season progresses. Iowa's got three home games against Big Ten dregs (Indiana, Northwestern, and Minnesota) coming up with one trip to Columbus standing between them and (probably) a national title shot.

A few other oddities:

• Dan Shanoff shot Florida down to #4 and Alabama down to #5 after the weekend's events, which seems kind of silly when the beneficiaries are Cincinnati and TCU.
• Hail to the Orange (an Illinois blog, not a Syracuse one) left Miami #8 despite their loss to Clemson.
• Not one but two voters have Oklahoma #9. One of them will win Mr. Bold below. The other is Buckeye Commentary .

Now on to the extracurriculars. First up are the teams which spur the most disagreement between voters as measured by standard deviation. Note that the standard deviation charts halt at #25 when looking for the lowest, otherwise teams that everyone agreed were terrible (say, Eastern Michigan) would all be at the top.

Most Disagreement

#	Team	StdDev
1	Oklahoma	3.5
2	Utah	3.3
3	Houston	3.2
4	Mississippi	2.9
5	Miami (Florida)	2.9

Oklahoma, which we'll get to in a moment, is a winner here. Weird year when this isn't dominated by the questionable undeafated mid-major. This year the questionable undefeated mid-major is in the top ten.

Ballot Math

First up are "Mr. Bold" and "Mr. Numb Existence." The former goes to the voter with the ballot most divergent from the poll at large. The number you see is the average difference between a person's opinion of a team and the poll's opinion.

Mr. Bold

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	Husker Mike's Blasphemy	Nebraska		3.90
2	Buckeye Commentary	Ohio State		3.36
3	Black Heart Gold Pants	Iowa		3.19
4	The Joe Cribbs Car Wash	Auburn		2.85
5	Frank Helps You	Tulane		2.68

Husker Mike's Blasphemy comes in solidly on top of this category for some extreme Big 12 love and Big 10 hatred: Oklahoma and Oklahoma State, respectively #23 and #14 above, come in at #9 and #10 on his ballot. Iowa doesn't show until #14. Unranked Arkansas also finds its way to  #16, in front of Penn State. Mike is the only voter going for Arkansas at all. Other oddities dot the ballot but those are the most extreme. Oklahoma! #9!

Mr. Numb Existence

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	WSU Football Blog	Washington State		0.91
2	Yet Another N.C. State Sports Blog	North Carolina State		0.94
3	Michigan Sports Center	Michigan		0.95
4	Red and Black Attack	Northern Illinois		0.97
5	The Only Colors	Michigan State		1.06

This is what I like to see in when it comes to Mr. Numb Existence: Washington State at the top, followed by NC State and Michigan. It doesn't feel right when the chalk is getting submitted by teams that aren't trudging through a miserable gray season. We're still nowhere near the hypothetical perfect ballot; WSU Football Blog doesn't even get past #1 before a change (Florida is its choice for the top spot). Margins are dipping as more information comes in, though.

Next we have the Coulter/Kos Award and the Straight Bangin' Award , which are again different sides of the same coin. The CKA and SBA go to the blogs with the highest and lowest bias rating, respectively. Bias rating is calculated by subtracting the blogger's vote for his own team from the poll-wide average. A high number indicates you are shameless homer. A low number indicates that you suffer from an abusive relationship with your football team.

The Coulter/Kos Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	The Smoking Musket	West Virginia		6.19
2	Subway Domer	Notre Dame		5.49
3	WVU Pressbox	West Virginia		5.19
4	Conquest Chronicles	Southern Cal		3.91
5	Men of the Scarlet and Gray	Ohio State		3.69

A late blip-gone run from Noel Devine saved West Virginia's bacon against UConn and prevented the CK Award from winning straight up, but a four point win for WVU does beat the spread and sends the award to 6-2 on the year there. (It's 5-3 straight up, with one of those losses being the Arkansas State-Iowa game.) Also, remember earlier in the season when three Nebraska voters had huge 8-11 point margins for two consecutive weeks? And remember how the award was thwarted by a furious fourth-quarter comeback in a monsoon against Missouri?

Yeah.

Sat, Oct 17 -- Texas Tech -- 10 - 31 (L)
Sat, Oct 24 --Iowa State -- 7 - 9 (L)

That latter game featured eight (eight!) turnovers. The CK Award took a bye week of its own, then rained down the thunder on Nebraska for its two weeks of insolence. As always, the lesson is don't vote your team too high in a poll because malevolent entities from opposite ends of the political spectrum will rip your team from limb to limb.

This week's winner is again West Virginia, though this time the victorious blog is The Smoking Musket . Chagrined, WVU Pressbox has slightly scaled back its enthusiasm. West Virginia gets… bler. South Florida. Remarkably, West Virginia is only a three-point favorite, so it will be tough to win with the points without winning straight up. How is this possible when USF's been humiliated by Pitt and Cincinnati its last two trips out? Grumble.

The Straight Bangin' Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	My Opinion on Sports	Oklahoma		-2.83
2	Dan Shanoff	Florida		-1.89
3	Tilting at WindMills	Oklahoma		-1.83
4	SportsFrog	Central Michigan		-1.73
5	Foul Balls	Notre Dame		-1.51

Thin gruel here as no team in the midst of a top-ten season has lost ignominiously in a while. I mean, when you get a Central Michigan voter in the top five you know it's a lean year for seasoon-changing upsets. MOOS wins for taking the completely reasonable step of omitting Oklahoma from its poll.

Swing is the total change in each ballot from last week to this week (obviously voters who didn't submit a ballot last week are not included). A high number means you are easily distracted by shiny things. A low number means that you're damn sure you're right no matter what reality says.

Mr. Manic-Depressive

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	Oread Boom Kings	Kansas		298
2	Braves and Birds	Georgia		128
3	Tilting at WindMills	Oklahoma		110
4	Clone Chronicles	Iowa State		108
5	Hey Jenny Slater	Georgia		106

Um. Please pay no attention to the spectacular number put up by Oread Boom Kings , as there was a glitch in the system last week that saw their ballot only register a top nine . I've never seen that before. I'll investigate.

Your real winner is Georgia blog Braves and Birds, which wasn't going to take the SEC teams' poor performance lying down. Texas gets bumped to #1. And only two teams—#11 Boise State and #23 South Carolina—remain static. Miami, VT, Texas Tech, Arkansas, and BYU all plummet. LSU, Pitt, Penn State, and a host of teams that slide up three or four slots are the main beneficiaries. This ballot is a classic example of late-season high swing events: you bet on a bunch of teams that run out and get crushed, and next week you hurl them out for their impertinence.

Mr. Stubborn

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	Rocky Top Talk	Tennessee		16
2	Husker Mike's Blasphemy	Nebraska		34
3	Gate 21	Tennessee		38
4	My Opinion on Sports	Oklahoma		44
5	Football Outsiders	Syracuse		44

Also pay no attention to Rocky Top Talk at the top of this list; that was another glitch. It's been that kind of week. Your real winner is Husker Mike's Blasphemy, which we've already talked about. The blasphemy.

 

Rank	Team	PPB	Delta
1	Alabama (73)	24.8	--
2	Florida (16)	24.0	--
3	Texas (1)	22.9	--
4	Cincinnati	20.6	3
5	Iowa	19.9	4
6	Boise State	19.5	1
7	Southern Cal	19.5	1
8	TCU	17.3	3
9	Miami (Florida)	17.2	1
10	LSU	15.1	2
11	Oregon	15.1	2
12	Georgia Tech	14.8	5
13	Penn State	12.5	2
14	Virginia Tech	12.0	10
15	Oklahoma State	11.5	3
16	Brigham Young	8.4	4
17	Houston	8.2	6
18	Pittsburgh	6.1	8
19	Utah	5.3	7
20	Ohio State	5.2	10
21	Texas Tech	4.9	5
22	West Virginia	3.1	4
23	South Carolina	3.0	2
24	Kansas	2.5	8
25	South Florida	1.9	6

Also Receiving Votes: Nebraska(1.4), Arizona(1.3), Oklahoma(1.1), Central Michigan(1.1), Notre Dame(1.0), Mississippi(0.7), Arkansas(0.6), Michigan(0.4), Wisconsin(0.4), California(0.4), Oregon State(0.3), Idaho(0.3), New Mexico(0.3), Auburn(0.3), Missouri(0.2), Boston College(0.1), Tulsa(0.1), Georgia(0.1), Arizona State(0.1), Wake Forest(0.0), Navy(0.0),

Total Ballots: 92

Votes by blog here , votes by team here .

Alabama's lead in the race for #1 is now commanding after Florida's narrow escape from pig sooie. Iowa and Cincinnati crack the top five after VT slips up and Boise continues playing no one of note, as they will for the rest of the season. And carnage at the bottom of the poll sees Pitt and Utah debut in the top 20, with Texas Tech and WVU joining them towards the bottom.

The Blogpoll does manage to boot 3-3 Oklahoma, though they're #3 in others receiving votes.

Justify Your Existence

The AP finally came around to the idea of Alabama at #1, but the polls that count are hanging onto the Gators. This will be moot by the SEC championship game at the latest, but it bodes unwell for the decision-making processes the old guys with the ballots are undertaking. Incredibly, Florida has a 49-9 edge on Alabama in the Coaches' poll.

Other items of difference between the bloggers and the coaches:

Bloggers hate USC, Kansas, Ohio State, and Oklahoma State. All are three spots lower in this poll than they are in the coaches, with #7 USC the biggest difference of opinion in the top ten: the coaches have them #4.

Bloggers love Iowa, Oregon, and Texas Tech, all of whom are three spots higher in the blogpoll than in the coaches.

Wack Ballot Watchdog

No weird #1s, so on to the blips:

• Wait. Check that: New Mexico's only vote of any variety is a #1 from Smart Football . This is a "protest vote " because none of the top three teams were impressive. Stern glances.
• Elsewhere in blogosphere icons that draw ire, EDSBS has Notre Dame #13 , five spots higher than the next most enthusiastic voter.
• Two guys are still voting for Georgia .
• Husker Mike, who we'll see winning Mr. Bold a bit later, has Boise State #14, three spots lower than anyone else in the poll.
• This is a poll-wide deviancy, but why is anyone voting for Ole Miss higher than the last few slots? Ole Miss has one win over a BCS team, and that's Vandy. With two non-fluky losses, one of them to South Carolina, there's no way to justify them in the top 20, but no fewer than five bloggers have them in there, with Gate 21 , The Daily Gopher , and My Opinion On Sports all sticking a team that it should be clear was very overrated in the top 15.
• The Daily Gopher also sticks Mizzou in at #14. Don't do things just because Don Draper tells you to, TDG.
• Braves & Birds really likes Texas Tech: the Red Raiders are #9 , six spots higher than anyone else dares to place them.

Now on to the extracurriculars. First up are the teams which spur the most disagreement between voters as measured by standard deviation. Note that the standard deviation charts halt at #25 when looking for the lowest, otherwise teams that everyone agreed were terrible (say, Eastern Michigan) would all be at the top.

Most Disagreement

#	Team	StdDev
1	Houston	3.8
2	Brigham Young	3.8
3	Ohio State	3.7
4	Utah	3.6
5	Texas Tech	3.4

All the Big 12 teams that filled this space last week lost, leaving the mid-majors with excellent wins but also humiliating losses in their rightful place. Ohio State's existence here is weird; not sure what people who have the Buckeyes any higher than their place in the poll are going on.

Ballot Math

First up are "Mr. Bold" and "Mr. Numb Existence." The former goes to the voter with the ballot most divergent from the poll at large. The number you see is the average difference between a person's opinion of a team and the poll's opinion.

Mr. Bold

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	Husker Mike's Blasphemy	Nebraska		4.01
2	Braves and Birds	Georgia		3.27
3	Black Heart Gold Pants	Iowa		3.10
4	The Joe Cribbs Car Wash	Auburn		3.08
5	Team Speed Kills	South Carolina		3.06

Husker Mike pulled an NCAA this week, crushing Boise State nine spots for Nebraska's loss to Texas Tech. Or something like this. Cornhuskers are all over the awards this week, and there's one obvious cause. Anyway: moving Boise down to #14 and keeping LSU afloat in the top five helps you win this award. As does only moving VT down four, putting Iowa all the way down at 12, and dumping South Carolina and Arkansas into nebulous "Oh God, what now?" section of the poll from 16-20.

But nothing tops this: Oklahoma #10, up a spot after losing a game to Texas to go 3-3. WTF?

Mr. Numb Existence

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	Michigan Sports Center	Michigan		0.81
2	The Only Colors	Michigan State		0.97
3	Oread Boom Kings	Kansas		1.08
4	Troy Nunes Is An Absolute Magician	Syracuse		1.26
5	The Wolverine Blog	Michigan		1.27

Margins dip alarmingly(!) as the state of Michigan asserts its dominance in dead-eyed complacency in the face of economic struggles. If only Michigan State had beaten UNC for the national title in basketball, this wouldn't have happened.

Next we have the Coulter/Kos Award and the Straight Bangin' Award , which are again different sides of the same coin. The CKA and SBA go to the blogs with the highest and lowest bias rating, respectively. Bias rating is calculated by subtracting the blogger's vote for his own team from the poll-wide average. A high number indicates you are shameless homer. A low number indicates that you suffer from an abusive relationship with your football team.

The Coulter/Kos Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	WVU Pressbox	West Virginia		6.89
2	Block U	Utah		4.74
3	Mountain West Connection	TCU		4.68
4	Black Heart Gold Pants	Iowa		4.10
5	Team Speed Kills	South Carolina		4.00

The CK Award won straight up last week as USC extended its dominance over Notre Dame with a 34-27 victory, but a late surge by Clausen and an ugly interception from Matt Barkley turned 34-14 into the aforementioned final score and cost the CK Award the game against the points. It's now 5-2 both straight up and against the spread. Bonus points should be awarded, though, for 1) causing Charlie Weis to botch the late game clock management so badly that the game ended on third down and 2) causing the game to end in agony, putting another second on the clock, and causing it to end in agony again. Also, Nebraska took the pipe a week late.

Next up on the docket is surging West Virginia, though it's probably not too offensive to the foul gods of football arrogance that WVU Pressbox slotted the 'Eers in at #16. You can see in the poll at large that there's a huge cliff from the top 15 to the next batch, with over three points per ballot separating #15 Oklahoma State and #16 BYU. WVU is a touchdown favorite over UConn this weekend.

The Straight Bangin' Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	Oread Boom Kings	Kansas		-2.43
2	Corn Nation	Nebraska		-1.25
3	Double Extra Point	Nebraska		-1.25
4	Foul Balls	Notre Dame		-1.03
5	Tilting at WindMills	Oklahoma		-0.95

The margins here are so vaporous they might as well be nonexistent: the five blogs listed above all omitted their teams from their ballots, which makes total sense in the aftermath of a crushing loss to Texas Tech, going 3-3, and yet another loss to USC. One team that actually made the top 25 saw one of their fans underrate them, and that was #23 Kansas.

Swing is the total change in each ballot from last week to this week (obviously voters who didn't submit a ballot last week are not included). A high number means you are easily distracted by shiny things. A low number means that you're damn sure you're right no matter what reality says.

Mr. Manic-Depressive

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	Corn Nation	Nebraska		164
2	Dan Shanoff	Florida		160
3	Oread Boom Kings	Kansas		158
4	Team Speed Kills	South Carolina		156
5	Michigan Sports Center	Michigan		150

The numbers continue to come down here, with Corn Nation showing up a second time to win with a number that wouldn't have cracked the top five a couple weeks ago. The win is largely due to misplaced faith in Ohio State, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Ole Miss, all of whom take big tumbles after weekend losses.

Mr. Stubborn

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	mgoblog	Michigan		72
2	The Ciskie Blog	Wisconsin		80
3	Fantasy College Blitz	Oklahoma State		80
4	Block C	Clemson		82
5	Frank Helps You	Tulane		84

Er. MGoBlog wins an award this week, so this is a little awkward. To clarify: I write MGoBlog with some help from others and this year I passed off the ballot to Tim just in case situations like this popped up. Providing meta-commentary on your own ballot is pretty weird. So meta-commentary on Tim's ballot: 72 is actually a very big number to win this category, so there's plenty of movement on the ballot: VT down ten, OSU down eight, etc.

Sometimes the winners here are just prescient and should have bet a lot of money on the weekend's games, and this appears to be the case here. Tim had already axed Oklahoma, was an OSU skeptic, had Nebraska slumming at #19, and had Kansas down at #23. So moving all those guys out cost less swing. One issue: Auburn down only three off a loss to Kentucky, that coming off an uncompetitive loss to Arkansas?

 

Rank	Team	PPB	StdDev	Delta
1	Alabama (56)	24.4	0.7	--
2	Florida (40)	24.4	0.6	--
3	Texas (2)	22.6	1.8	--
4	Virginia Tech	21.2	1.8	1
5	Boise State	19.6	3.1	1
6	Southern Cal	18.9	2.5	2
7	Cincinnati	18.8	2.6	--
8	Miami (Florida)	16.4	2.7	1
9	Iowa	16.4	3.3	3
10	Ohio State	16.2	2.8	1
11	TCU	15.4	3.0	1
12	LSU	14.1	3.6	8
13	Oregon	13.1	3.2	--
14	Nebraska	10.4	3.5	4
15	Penn State	10.0	4.3	--
16	Kansas	8.5	4.4	1
17	Georgia Tech	8.5	3.6	2
18	Oklahoma State	8.2	3.9	2
19	South Florida	6.8	4.0	3
20	Brigham Young	6.6	3.6	1
21	South Carolina	5.2	2.9	5
22	Oklahoma	5.2	4.4	3
23	Houston	3.4	3.7	3
24	Auburn	2.0	2.8	10
25	Notre Dame	1.9	2.9	1

Also Receiving Votes: Pittsburgh(1.3), Utah(1.2), Wisconsin(1.1), Missouri(0.7), Mississippi(0.5), Arkansas(0.5), West Virginia(0.4), Central Michigan(0.3), Texas Tech(0.3), Arizona(0.1), Oregon State(0.1), Georgia(0.1), Stanford(0.1), Michigan(0.0), Tulsa(0.0), Idaho(0.0), UAB(0.0), Tennessee(0.0),

Total Ballots: 98

Votes by blog here , votes by team here .

The Alabama-Florida war gets incredibly tight, with Alabama holding on to the top spot by less than a tenth of a point despite having a solid edge in first place votes. Elsewhere, LSU and Auburn take precipitous falls, Houston re-introduces itself with a third win over a BCS opponent, Iowa leaps Ohio State to become the top-ranked Big Ten team, and Notre Dame slips in at the end for what figures to be a brief appearance.

Justify Your Existence

The main thing remains the same: for the third straight week, the Blogpoll is the only poll to even consider the possibility that someone other than Florida is the top team in the country: UF gets 50 of 60 AP first-place votes and 53 of 59 coaches' first-place votes.

Other differences of note:

• The bottom end of the top ten is considerably different than the coaches, with Cincinnati, Miami, and Iowa up 2, 3, and 3 spots from the coaches poll. TCU, LSU, and Ohio State take dives of similar length.
• Bloggers have gotten over that Boise State game a lot faster, ranking Oregon #13. The coaches have them #16. Nebraska and GT are also up three spots.
• Taking the hit for those folks are Oklahoma State (down 4) and Oklahoma (down 4).

Wack Ballot Watchdog

There aren't a whole lot of massive oddities this week, but there are a few:

• Some wag no doubt wanting to taunt the AP poll slipped Idaho in at #25. Idaho is 5-1 but lost its only game against a BCS opponent 42-23 to Washington.
• Orange::44 actually moved Georgia up three spots to #20 after they got beat up by a giant catfish.
• Buckeye Commentary is the first voter to violate Boise-Oregon lockstep causality by placing Oregon #12 and Boise #17. Several other bloggers are hovering near that step and will probably take it the next time Oregon beats a quality opponent at the same time Boise is running it up on, well, Idaho.
• Saurian Sagacity has a couple of weird votes: USF #6 and USC #16 , each of those at least three points worth of outlier in the appropriate direction.
• Black Heart Gold Pants is enthusiastic about… Pittsburgh ? #14, four slots higher than any other voter? Okay.
• I don't get people hanging on to Ole Miss, which is five games into the season and has nothing but wins over Vandy and a couple of nonconference tomato cans to its credit. The most egregious hanger-on is Corn Nation , which still has the Rebels #14 .

Now on to the extracurriculars. First up are the teams which spur the most and least disagreement between voters as measured by standard deviation. Note that the standard deviation charts halt at #25 when looking for the lowest, otherwise teams that everyone agreed were terrible (say, Eastern Michigan) would all be at the top.

Highest stdev

#	Team	StdDev
1	Oklahoma	4.4
2	Kansas	4.4
3	Penn State	4.3
4	South Florida	4.0
5	Oklahoma State	3.9

Oklahoma, which still hasn't done anything but should be good, still takes the top spot here. See also: Kansas, Penn State.

Ballot Math

First up are "Mr. Bold" and "Mr. Numb Existence." The former goes to the voter with the ballot most divergent from the poll at large. The number you see is the average difference between a person's opinion of a team and the poll's opinion.

Mr. Bold

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	Buckeye Commentary	Ohio State		3.62
2	The Tortilla Retort	Texas Tech		3.46
3	Gate 21	Tennessee		3.42
4	SimonOnSports	Connecticut		3.35
5	Dawg Sports	Georgia		3.27

The numbers here have fallen precipitously as the season has churned along and we finally have definitive answers on many teams: Ole Miss no, Iowa yes.The resume folk are still amongst us (SimonOnSports and Dawg Sports count themselves in that number) but are no longer sweeping the top spots.

This week the top spot goes to Buckeye Commentary , forcing me to remember my vow not to taunt Ohio State fans for as long as they can put a FOR SALE sign at Michigan Stadium. This is extremely difficult when 3-2 Oklahoma finds itself the #8 team in the country, up eight, and previously #10 Oklahoma State falls 13 places. Oklahoma beat Baylor by a lot. Oklahoma State squeezed by A&M. Did Buckeye Commentary confuse the two? Don't make fun. Be respectful. Don't make fun. Yes. Yes, it appears so. Why would you have either team in the top ten? I don't know. Sir.

Mr. Numb Existence

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	The Wolverine Blog	Michigan		1.01
2	WSU Football Blog	Washington State		1.18
3	We Will Always Have Tempe	Ohio State		1.25
4	The Bull Gator	Florida		1.26
5	The Only Colors	Michigan State		1.29

The numbers dip here, too, with The Wolverine Blog—a repeat winner—threatening to dip under 1.00 error. But we're still a ways from the Ballot of Perfect Boredom: The Wolverine Blog doesn't make it past #6 (Cincinnati) before hitting a difference.

Next we have the Coulter/Kos Award and the Straight Bangin' Award , which are again different sides of the same coin. The CKA and SBA go to the blogs with the highest and lowest bias rating, respectively. Bias rating is calculated by subtracting the blogger's vote for his own team from the poll-wide average. A high number indicates you are shameless homer. A low number indicates that you suffer from an abusive relationship with your football team.

The Coulter/Kos Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	Subway Domer	Notre Dame		9.07
2	Big Red Network	Nebraska		6.55
3	FNF Magazine: The Blog	South Florida		6.21
4	The Joe Cribbs Car Wash	Auburn		6.04
5	Fantasy College Blitz	Oklahoma State		5.78

For three quarters it looked like the CK Award would go a creepy 6-0 on the season (when measured against the spread). A torrential downpour shut down offenses, a last second fourth-and-goal conversion staked Missouri to a two-score lead, and no one was going anywhere. Then Blaine Gabbert threw two straight preposterous interceptions and Nebraska came roaring back. Curses. The award is now 5-1 on the year, and we have are answer to the question about the CK Award's ability to focus its rage: it does pretty well for two weeks but gets confused and wanders off just at the end.

Nebraska's poll surge has bounced many—though not all—of the enthusiastic Huskers out of the top five and leaves Notre Dame blog Subway Domer clear by more than two full points. Notre Dame, of course, has USC this week. The Trojans are favored by ten.

The Straight Bangin' Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	Gobbler Country	Virginia Tech		-2.15
2	Foul Balls	Notre Dame		-1.93
3	The Rakes of Mallow	Notre Dame		-1.93
4	The Ciskie Blog	Wisconsin		-1.08
5	Rock M Nation	Missouri		-0.71

With the nation's big early disappointments removed from either their latest wreckage or the polls themselves—I'm betting Georgia bloggers would have taken the opportunity to rank their team #121 of 120 if given the opportunity—the numbers here get very slim. Gobbler Country 's placement of VT #7, three slots below its final poll position, is your winner, with a couple of Notre Dame blogs that omitted the skin-of-their-teeth Irish from their ballots coming up just behind.

Swing is the total change in each ballot from last week to this week (obviously voters who didn't submit a ballot last week are not included). A high number means you are easily distracted by shiny things. A low number means that you're damn sure you're right no matter what reality says.

Mr. Manic-Depressive

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	Tomahawk Nation	Florida State		154
2	Saurian Sagacity	Florida		146
3	SimonOnSports	Connecticut		142
4	Black Heart Gold Pants	Iowa		126
5	Team Speed Kills	South Carolina		120

If you're wondering how to win this award, try having Florida #20 and shooting the Gators all the way to #2 in the aftermath of their win against LSU, and then top that by having #25 Ohio State fly up to #13 and dropping #12 Georgia all the way out of the poll. Not that that last decision isn't justified, its just… why would you have Georgia #12 even before the events of Saturday?

Mr. Stubborn

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	My Opinion on Sports	Oklahoma		26
2	Big Red Network	Nebraska		36
3	Husker Mike's Blasphemy	Nebraska		42
4	The Tortilla Retort	Texas Tech		44
5	The Auburner	Auburn		44

Some of this is prescience: both Nebraska blogs already had the Huskers higher than the general population and didn't have to move them that far after they beat Missouri. But some of it's just plain stubborn: you winner here didn't move anyone in his top ten except to flip LSU and Ohio State (8 and 6 now, respectively) and dropping Mississippi six spots, inexplicably leaving a team that hasn't done anything at all this year #17.

The poll discourages looking at your old ballot when you're coming up with your new one because that encourages the sort of intertia you see in a lot of these ballots; overvaluing your opinion last week tends to undervalue actual on-field events.

 

Rank	Team	PPB	Delta
1	Alabama (50)	24.2	--
2	Florida (43)	23.8	--
3	Texas (4)	23.0	--
4	LSU	19.9	3
5	Virginia Tech	19.8	--
6	Boise State	19.7	2
7	Cincinnati	18.5	1
8	Southern Cal	18.2	--
9	Miami (Florida)	15.5	6
10	TCU	15.3	--
11	Ohio State	15.0	1
12	Iowa	14.4	1
13	Oregon	11.4	3
14	Auburn	10.3	9
15	Penn State	9.0	3
16	Oklahoma State	8.7	2
17	Kansas	8.0	2
18	Nebraska	5.7	3
19	Georgia Tech	5.4	7
20	Missouri	5.1	6
21	Brigham Young	5.0	1
22	South Florida	4.9	4
23	Mississippi	4.4	2
24	Wisconsin	3.9	2
25	Oklahoma	3.7	14

Also Receiving Votes: South Carolina(3.5), Houston(1.9), Georgia(1.8), Stanford(1.6), Notre Dame(1.1), Michigan(0.6), Arizona(0.5), West Virginia(0.3), Pittsburgh(0.2), Boston College(0.2), Utah(0.2), Connecticut(0.1), California(0.1), UCLA(0.1), Texas Tech(0.1), Central Michigan(0.0), UAB(0.0),

Total Ballots: 97

Votes by blog here , votes by team here .

After a terribly exciting week in which the BlogPoll anointed a new #1 and generally demonstrated itself to be totally awesome relative to the actual polls that comprise the BCS, it's a bit of of a return to normalcy. This will be the theme of the rest of the year as games keep rolling in and your wiggle room to do something interesting evaporates.

This week the big movers are Miami (That Miami), which squeezed by Oklahoma and re-established its top-ten bonafides after the Virginia Tech embarrassment of a week ago, Auburn, which got a not-as-close-as-it-looked victory at Tennessee and has finally exorcised the stink of last year to pollsters, Georgia Tech, which won at Mississippi State, and Missouri, which did absolutely nothing but watched the back end of the poll implode whilst enjoying cheeseburgers.

Oklahoma is the most obvious faller but don't forget about poor Houston, which went from the top ten penthouse to gone after losing to UTEP by lots. Don't ask how or why. It just is. Georgia and Michigan also dropped out.

Justify Your Existence

Alabama, #3 everywhere else, is a tentative #1 here. They've got six first place votes total across the AP and Coaches' polls. Our one-week skepticism of LSU has been battered back into shape by Les Miles's ability to inexplicably pull his team out of the fire, but other major differences of opinion:

WE LIKE

• Alabama, obviously.
• Miami is #9 here, #11 in both other polls.
• Auburn is #13 here compared to #17 AP and #19 Coaches.
• GT is #19 here, #23/#22 elsewhere.

WE DON'T LIKE

• Oklahoma is #19 to the AP and #21 to the Coaches but is just barely hanging on to the last spot here.
• OSU (#11) meets considerably more skepticism here than in the other polls, where they're 8 and 9.
• Ole Miss is #23 here, #20 in the AP, and #16(!!!) in the Coaches' poll.

LOL WUT

• The coaches still have Penn State above Iowa.

Wack Ballot Watchdog

Oddities:

• I know we're getting to the point in the season where pure head-to-head isn't necessarily the best or only way to rank teams, but it seems hard to defend placing Oregon eight spots in front of a team (Boise State) that housed them on the opening weekend and has not lost, as Buckeye Commentary does.
• Two voters are still inexplicably going for Cal . I guess the Maryland win looks better this week, but come on.
• If you think #12 is low for Florida , you haven't seen anything yet: Tomahawk Nation puts UF #20, down 15 after a bye week and behind Michigan(!?).
• The Auburner allmost scales those same heights by placing LSU #20 .
• Arizona just picked up a nice win in Corvallis, but, um: BHGP ranks them #6 . It wasn't that nice.

And an omissions: where is South Carolina? Surely wins over NC State and Ole Miss plus a narrow, narrow loss to UGA is worth poll entry over Kansas or whoever.

Now on to the extracurriculars. First up are the teams which spur the most and least disagreement between voters as measured by standard deviation. Note that the standard deviation charts halt at #25 when looking for the lowest, otherwise teams that everyone agreed were terrible (say, Eastern Michigan) would all be at the top.

Most Disagreement

#	Team	StdDev
1	Kansas	4.9
2	Oklahoma State	4.9
3	Nebraska	4.7
4	South Florida	4.6
5	Penn State	4.5

No one knows much about the Big 12. Here is a rant on that subject from War Blog Eagle that might explain things :

You’ll notice there are only two Big 12 teams in the ballot above. This is because the Big 12 is a joke.

Herewith, a comprehensive list of the entire conference’s nonconference victories to date, recalling that we have now entered the sixth week of the season: [long list of junk with Georgia, Wake Forest and Illinois the only BCS opponents therein] [Further list of B12 nonconference matchups that were not wins.]

Of course, here’s the catch: they lost every one of those games. Take the actual contenders for the top 25 in the Big 12–Texas, Oklahoma, Okie St., Texas Tech, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri–and they’re a combined 1-5 against legitimate nonconference opponents. (Southern Miss lost that designation when it slipped up against UAB, by the way.) 1-5 .

But I’m supposed to rank Kansas anyway, right, because they’re 4-0 and they’re Kansas? I’m supposed to rank Oklahoma anyway, because they’ve beaten Tulsa and Idaho St. and they’re Oklahoma?

Some people say yes. Others say not. Result: Big 12 mania atop this metric.

Ballot Math

First up are "Mr. Bold" and "Mr. Numb Existence." The former goes to the voter with the ballot most divergent from the poll at large. The number you see is the average difference between a person's opinion of a team and the poll's opinion.

Mr. Bold

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	Tomahawk Nation	Florida State		6.17
2	Saurian Sagacity	Florida		5.81
3	SimonOnSports	Connecticut		5.53
4	The Tortilla Retort	Texas Tech		4.24
5	Black Heart Gold Pants	Iowa		4.10

Perhaps on the strength of that wack #20 vote for Florida, Tomahawk Nation eases into possession of Mr. Bold . Many, many weird votes, including: Miami #2, Iowa #3, South Carolina #10, Houston still #14, Texas #16, Michigan #19, the aforementioned Florida #20, and Ohio State #25. From your ballot to God's ears, TN.

Mr. Numb Existence

#	Blog	Team		Avg Error
1	Troy Nunes Is An Absolute Magician	Syracuse		1.40
2	The Only Colors	Michigan State		1.53
3	The Wolverine Blog	Michigan		1.56
4	Third Saturday in Blogtober	Alabama		1.60
5	Buffs.tv	Colorado		1.61

Troy Nunes Is An Absolute Magician 's long coverage of Syracuse athletics has finally netted it something of value: the week five, 2009, Mr. Numb Existence award. Next up: the International Bowl ?

Next we have the Coulter/Kos Award and the Straight Bangin' Award , which are again different sides of the same coin. The CKA and SBA go to the blogs with the highest and lowest bias rating, respectively. Bias rating is calculated by subtracting the blogger's vote for his own team from the poll-wide average. A high number indicates you are shameless homer. A low number indicates that you suffer from an abusive relationship with your football team.

The Coulter/Kos Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	Big Red Network	Nebraska		11.33
2	Husker Mike's Blasphemy	Nebraska		8.33
3	Black Heart Gold Pants	Iowa		7.60
4	Braves and Birds	Georgia		7.25
5	Subway Domer	Notre Dame		6.93

Foul power of the CK Award update(!): Iowa managed to escape the true overpowering wrath of the double-headed god of bias, but only just. A Ricky Stanzi pick-six brought Arkansas State within ten and then the Red Wolves—why is it that teams that change their name from something offensively Indian, in this case the "Indians," always explicitly put red in their nicknames afterwards?—then drove for a sphincter-tightening touchdown to make it 24-21. They could not close the deal, perhaps because the CK Award was splitting its steely gaze between Nebraska (Nebraska blogs finished 1-2 last week with another Husker blogger in the #4 spot) and the Hawkeyes, who only finished third in last week's balloting but were thrust into the spotlight because of a Nebraska bye.

But they did easily beat the spread, bringing the CK Award to 6-0 on the season against Vegas and 5-1 straight up, with an undefeated Big Ten team's three point escape against a Sunbelt team the lone loss. Wrath and woe.

We'll never find out if the CK Award stores up hatred for later since Nebraska blogs take 1-2 again this week. That #4 guy must have got wise. Nebraska travels to Missouri to open Big 12 play; that line opened as a pick-em but has moved to Nebraska –3.

Oh, right: congratulations to the Big Red Network for pulling this in for a second consecutive week.

The Straight Bangin' Award

#	Blog	Team		Bias
1	Saurian Sagacity	Florida		-4.78
2	Tilting at WindMills	Oklahoma		-3.68
3	Gobbler Country	Virginia Tech		-1.78
4	Dawg Sports	Georgia		-1.75
5	Hey Jenny Slater	Georgia		-1.75

Saurian Sagacity, a dedicated resume-ranking blog that takes an extra dim view of cupcakin' it, often ends up here early in the season when their team of choice spends lots of its time cupcakin' it. And here they are, dropping Florida down to #7 after a bye week.

SIDE NOTE : they have Alabama and Auburn 1-2 at this juncture, which would make for a Football Armageddon to end all Football Armageddons. The entire state would devolve. The loser would have to leave. They'd pile them up in two square miles in the northwest corner of the State and build a big fence around it.

Swing is the total change in each ballot from last week to this week (obviously voters who didn't submit a ballot last week are not included). A high number means you are easily distracted by shiny things. A low number means that you're damn sure you're right no matter what reality says.

Mr. Manic-Depressive

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	Saurian Sagacity	Florida		220
2	Black Heart Gold Pants	Iowa		182
3	Dr. Saturday	Southern Miss		176
4	Tomahawk Nation	Florida State		164
5	The Joe Cribbs Car Wash	Auburn		156

Wheeee! This award is still the realm of the dedicated resume-ranker, with the aforementioned Saurian Sagacity racking up 220 points worth of changes and easily outdistancing the pack. Auburn, Miami, Penn State, Michigan, and previous #2 Houston all see double-digit shifts and the only team to remain in the same spot is Alabama. That is tossing your ballot away and starting anew.

Mr. Stubborn

#	Blog	Team		Swing
1	Clone Chronicles	Iowa State		60
2	Hey Jenny Slater	Georgia		60
3	Yet Another N.C. State Sports Blog	North Carolina State		62
4	Buffs.tv	Colorado		66
5	The Nittany Line	Penn State		66

On the other side of the ledger, this week we have a tie for Mr. Stubborn . Both ballots actually see a fair share of movement—60 is a big winning number here—but most of the ups and downs are in lockstep; no major shifts. Also Clone Chronicles still has Oklahoma #11, which what?