It's the first in-season Blogpoll of the year, so it's time for me to talk about my voting philosophy at the beginning fo the season. First of all, no team without a win is in the Week 1 ballot. This is the first major nod toward resume voting, because you have no resume if you no wins. Next week, no team without a win over an FBS team will be ranked.
Also this week, I take a "continuation" ballot of the teams that won -- essentially moving some of the teams up based on their wins and rarely if ever moving a team down unless it's excised for losing -- and weigh it double. I then combine that ballot with a straight resume ballot with no special weighting. That's a start. Then I move teams around until everything "looks" right. Next week I won't tweak it at all, the following week I'll weigh each evenly, and the fourth week I'll weigh the resume ballot twice and the continuation ballot once.
At that point, every team will have enough information to do a completely resume-based ballot, and the continuation ballot will go away until next year. Which is how it should be for everyone who fills out a ballot. On to what that means so far this year.
1 Alabama
2 Oklahoma
3 LSU
4 Stanford
5 Florida State
LSU was the hardest team for me this week. I have a general rule about not moving winning teams down in Week 1, simply because I don't think you should hold unimpressive wins against teams. Why? Because college football has no preseason in which to work out the kinks. But LSU looked incredible Saturday, and No. 6 Oregon was the only team above them to lose. So I moved LSU up and nearly put them at first before deciding that would be unfair to Alabama and Oklahoma for now. The Tide and the Sooners will have the opportunity to either stay where they are or move down after their looming games with BCS out-of-conference foes. One of them you see right there in the the No. 5 spot. The stasis for Stanford and Florida State (sans Stanford moving down to make room for LSU) is the rest of the Top 5.
6 Nebraska
7 Boise State
8 Texas A&M
9 Wisconsin
10 Oklahoma State
The Huskers were the team to fall out of the Top 5 for LSU ... well, just cuz. Boise State moves up after the big win over Georgia. Texas A&M looked impressive against SMU, though their defensive backs might not want to be so polite in future games. Wisconsin and Oklahoma State shuffled around to make room for Boise State. I guess the onset of neutral-site big games has pretty much annihilated my first-week rule.
11 South Carolina
12 Arizona State
13 Baylor
14 Virginia Tech
15 Mississippi State
South Carolina looked like a Top 5 team with Stephen Garcia and a Top 50 team with Connor Shaw, so 11 might be generous. Baylor's win against TCU was impressive, though it might be less so if TCU's defense ends up having taken an even bigger step back than we thought. The other three teams here are pretty much just moving around because of other shifts.
16 Arkansas
17 South Florida
18 West Virginia
19 Houston
20 Pitt
Lot of stasis and moving up here. South Florida basically trades spots with Notre Dame as part of a three-pack of Big East teams. Really. I liked South Florida and West Virginia and basically have to keep Pitt. Houston probably needs to do a bit better than they did against UCLA to stick around.
21 Missouri
22 BYU
23 Michigan State
24 Southern Miss
25 Navy
This is the same 21-25 that I had last week, despite some worryingly close scores against mid-majors. What do you mean, BYU played an SEC team?