Blogpoll: As the Season Gets Longer, Awful Feels Softer Edition

Rank	Team	Delta
1	LSU	--
2	Southern Cal	--
3	Florida	--
4	California	1
5	Boston College	4
6	Oregon	2
7	Clemson	--
8	Wisconsin	5
9	Oklahoma	5
10	West Virginia	4
11	Texas	1
12	Ohio State	2
13	Kentucky	2
14	South Florida	2
15	South Carolina	4
16	Georgia	10
17	Missouri	--
18	Arizona State	5
19	Alabama	9
20	Cincinnati	--
21	Michigan State	3
22	Rutgers	1
23	Nebraska	1
24	Purdue	2
25	Virginia	1
Dropped Out: Penn State (#19), Hawaii (#24), Texas A&M (#25).

We begin our blogpoll with a reading from the prophet Modest Mouse:

As life gets longer, awful feels softer, and it feels pretty soft to me. And if it takes shit to make bliss well I feel pretty blissfully.

Nomini patri, fili, spiriti sancti. Amen. Ad maiorem dei glorium.

Right, so the world of food-ball has gotten interesting with some exciting results last week. So far, there hasn't been a circular wheel of death in the SEC yet, but that still hasn't stopped the pollsters (and the blogpoll, idiots!!!) from ranking Georgia above South Carolina, despite the fact that... y'know... they lost to the Cocks at home. Ugh.

• LSU still holds the top seed. Yeah, Southern Cal is awesome, but four weeks into it, the resume is tilted toward the Tigers.



• Oklahoma takes a dive. No offense to the Sooners, but when we're four weeks in to the season, you should have a meaningful win to hang your hat on. While Oklahoma's pantsing of the Hurricanes was a lovely thing to see, it's hardly anything to build your entire top five ranking case around, particularly with a supporting cast as unimpressive as North Texas, Utah State, and Tulsa.



• Ditto West Virginia. Friday's tilt at Raymond James should solidify the Mountaineer's position. For the time being, though, I'm not impressed.



• The Cocks take a small slide after faring admirably against the soul-crushing machine that is LSU. Normally, I wouldn't drop a team at all for playing tight with the Tigers, but Carolina was enjoying a somewhat inflated ranking due to their solid early-season wins. Call it a correction more than a punishment.



• The Dawgs are back. The lack of a meaningful win dumped Georgia from my poll last week, but an impressive victory over Alabama brought a ten-spot correction for Georgia. Plus it also caused a major correction for Alabama. All in all, I'm pretty comfortable with where the Cocks-Dawgs-Tide are standing right now, and feel that we've finally gotten enough data to equalize their positions for the time being. I don't anticipate any wild mood swings in their rankings in the near future.



• Penn State is out. While it's not scientific, I use a points system to help get an understanding of what a team has done to earn their ranking. Essentially, it's 0 points for a win over a D-1AA team or traditional patsy, half a point for a mid-major, one point for a BCS conference win, and two points for a particularly impressive win (top 15ish team or top 25ish team on the road). Similarly, the deductions for losses are 0 points for a chainsaw team (LSU, USC), -1 point for a good/average team, and -2 points for a below average squad. After four weeks, Penn State's score is -1. Yeah, it pained me to give them 0 points for beating Notre Dame, but that's the breaks with the quality of the team. Wins over FIU, Notre Dame, and Buffalo add nothing to their claim to legitimacy, and a loss to a down-and-out Michigan team on the rebound means that the Nittany Lions will have some work to do before they can justify a spot in the poll. Just a heads-up, beating Ron Zook next week will not be sufficient.