As mentioned this morning, this week's BlogPoll is out. For all the time we bloggers spend carping about rankings among coaches and voters who do not take seriously enough their charge, there remain some headscratching results among the BlogPoll consensus.
Take yesterday's comparison between Texas and Michigan. There's a rather interesting question to be answered regarding how much to penalize the Wolverines for a horrific loss, as well as how much to penalize Texas for no substantive wins. How much should we value Michigan's recent wins against their bad losses? Has Texas done enough to justify a ranking at all?
However you resolve those questions, I'm left looking at the poll and wondering how Auburn is ranked behind either team. I'll be conservative and put Mississippi State in the "bad loss" category, though they're not quite the whipping posts they've been in recent years. Even so, take a look:
The justification for placing Auburn behind Texas is beyond me. Auburn has Texas whipped in quality wins; Texas has matched Auburn in bad losses, and Auburn has one more loss only because it's played two teams (LSU and South Florida) who are far superior to anyone Texas has faced in 2007 outside of Oklahoma. Hell, there's even a common opponent (KSU) who Auburn defeated and Texas fell flat. All told, the more you look at Texas' body of work, the more difficult it becomes to place Texas on the ballot at all.
As for Michigan? Auburn has a win at Florida which spanks the Wolverines' top win. The intermediate stuff is roughly equal. The only case for dinging Auburn is the home loss to Mississippi State, but if you want to penalize harshly for that kind of loss, it has to be uniform. There would be no basis for not applying it to Michigan as well.
Anyone?
--PB--