Team Speed Kills Draft BlogPoll Ballot for Week 10

The season is now entering the part of the year when people start to pull upsets and we find which results are upsets, which requires some readjustments of our assumptions and also makes polls a bit odder. Our effort:

As far as ties, I largely relied on either the SEC homerism bonus or Year2's ballot to break them, since I saw tragically little college football this weekend. Ties broke: Oregon-Oklahoma, South Carolina-Michigan State, Georgia-Michigan, Wisconsin-Arizona State and Cincinnati-Texas for the last spot on the ballot.

Chart first, a few comments after the jump to sort of explain it as best I can.

The first five spots are pretty self-explanatory. Arkansas has the best single loss in the country aside from maybe Penn State and Oregon, and both of them have a far worse collection of wins to go with it. Clemson lost to Georgia Tech. To repeat that simply because I want to repeat it: Clemson lost to Georgia Tech. A deal is a deal, so I will now cheer for Georgia Tech whenever they're not playing South Carolina. At least until the Jackets annoy me, which probably won't take all that long seeing as how they're an ACC team and everything. Oklahoma's wins could maybe push it higher, but that Texas Tech loss looks dramatically worse because of other teams that didn't lose to Texas Tech (coughcoughIowaStatecoughcough). I might have needed to drop Michigan State a little bit more than this, but for whom?

Oregon might be the most underrated team on my ballot, but their wins continue to pale in comparison to what everyone else is doing right now. You beat Arizona State -- that's quite nice -- and who else? Setting aside the historical significance, I see nothing impressive enough about defeating Tennessee 14-3 to warrant moving South Carolina up at all. I'm still not sure Penn State is a quality football team, but they keep winning enough for me to move them up a bit more each week. Or, as the case may be, a lot more this week (from No. 22 to No. 14). I might be wildly overvaluing Georgia here, but I'm okay with that for the time being. Georgia Tech gets the "I love you for defeating Clemson" bump and bow at No. 17.

The last five are Houston and throwing darts at names. No, I'm not even considering ranking any of the Big East teams right now, largely because I don't see any of them that I feel like ranking. Cincinnati's wins aren't that much better than Houston's, in my opinion, and I wouldn't be ranking the Cougars if they had lost by 20-something to Tennessee.