Blogpoll: The Taste of Tears Edition

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Ohio State	--
2	Michigan	1
3	Florida	1
4	LSU	1
5	Louisville	2
6	Southern Cal	4
7	Boise State	1
8	Auburn	1
9	Oklahoma	1
10	Notre Dame	1
11	Wisconsin	1
12	Arkansas	4
13	West Virginia	--
14	Wake Forest	2
15	Tennessee	--
16	Virginia Tech	2
17	Rutgers	--
18	Brigham Young	2
19	Texas A&M	4
20	California	2
21	Texas	3
22	Nebraska	4
23	Oregon State	2
24	UCLA	2
25	TCU	1
Dropped Out: Georgia Tech (#19), Hawaii (#21).

Well, reason is more or less dead and we're locked into full-on monkey poo flinging. You will observe that Michigan is number two right now, so you Wolverines fans can enjoy the cold comfort that in my flawed and skewed personal metric for worthiness, they happen to have had the second best season in the country this year. If I ran college football, you still wouldn't be in the title game, you'd be hosting Boise State this weekend in Ann Arbor in the first round of the playoffs.

So Notre Dame is number ten. I think I'm at risk of the homer award because of the negative skew in rankings for the Irish in the blogpoll in general (week in and week out, it's 2 to 3 spots lower than the AP/USA Today/Harris/BCS), but I think I'm being as fair as possible with the Irish. You'll observe I have every team that is ranked above the Irish in those three other fine polls ranked higher, with the lone exception of Wisconsin. Service Academies and all, Notre Dame's strength of schedule is several orders of magnitude more diffcult than Wisconsin's, and the Irish have beaten the two best teams Wisconsin has beaten in similar if not demonstrably better fashion. I stand by my decision.

Everything else is kind of a grab bag, most of which has stayed pretty stable save for your conference championship contenders skittering about a bit.

Since I still have quite a bit of vertical space to fill, let's take a look at the House Rock Built Championship Series Playoffs round one, hypothetically speakinig. Toss out conference championship automatic bids or a special preferred clause for Notre Dame, it's straight-up top 8 are in. We're adding one more regular-season home game before the bowl season, and we're making room by axing the 12th game requirement (which has given us the great joy of Florida vs. Western Carolina and Notre Dame-Army). The matchups:

• Auburn at Ohio State
• Boise State at Michigan
• USC at Florida
• Louisville at LSU

Now that's a great weekend of college football, my chum. Or you can watch the New Mexico Bowl. You know, your choice.