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I see I’m catching a lot of flack here for my computer poll (and understandably so), to which I say: vote in the poll! The more participants, the more my funky algorithm gets drowned out. I will say, I did tweak it this year to further devalue preseason expectations, but I can’t let it just stand on 1.5 weeks of data. Preseason expectations get fully flushed out after week 4.

Also, because the transfer portal makes it so hard to get a read on rosters early in the season, I outsourced the returning production variable to Action Network’s metric. It worked pretty well last year, but I’m not sure they’re on the mark this year. If anyone has a better source (that is free or cheap), I’m willing to give it a try for next year.

I don’t get this group. How is Florida State ranked, while Texas A&M and Clemson aren’t? Never mind that Boston College is 4 spots behind. I didn’t put them on my poll, which means that Florida State got an average of #19 from the other 3 voters. I don’t know how you look at that team and still think the Seminoles are a top 20 team.

alabama is all lowercase, please don’t fix it.

The spreadsheet of votes is locked. I can’t see where all the polls ranked everyone.

I see a few other trends, but I think they are just outliers due to the small sample size. I bet it will all get figured out in the next 2 weeks.

USC won. Clemson lost. Clemson is no longer in the poll results.

The only thing that could make this week better is if Georgia had also lost, but… gotta pick the lesser evil 😆

My ballot – still a little weird from preseason expectations, but that’s mostly factored out now. The bigger issue is that 2-3 weeks of data is too small a sample size for the computer to know what to do with. Teams that played P4 teams are very high (even if they lost), whereas teams that played FCS schools are very low (even if they blew them out). Teams that already had a bye are even lower (exacerbated by this season having an extra bye week). It should all be sorted out in a couple weeks.

I will say, by eye test I really disagree with some of these rankings (I mean, ou up to number 4???) but I find the pure data intriguing, especially for spots 40ish through 134 which a lot of people ignore. I’m considering a few tweaks (to diminish the effects of garbage time stat padding), but it would make the algorithm more complex. Without fully automating it, I need to keep it simple enough to tabulate semi-manually every week. Hoping I can use next offseason to tinker with some scripts.

My ballot this week:

1. Georgia
2. Texas
3. Ole Miss
4. Ohio State
5. Tennessee
6. Louisville
7. Miami (FL)
8. Alabama
9. Missouri
10. Oregon
11. Oklahoma
12. USC
13. Penn State
14. Utah
15. Kansas State
16. Michigan
17. LSU
18. Oklahoma State
19. UCF
20. Vanderbilt
21. Boston College
22. South Carolina
23. Kentucky
24. Nebraska
25. Clemson

So just checking, are we supposed to submit our ballots for week 3 in the link above? Because I did, but looking at the results it seems like it might still have week 2 ballots as well.

Trends:

• UGA is definitely our favorite so far, let’s see if anyone can bridge that gap
• FSU was a massive loser, even if they maybe should’ve lost even more
• FSU is however, the only “state” school ranked higher than their non “state” sister school
• USC actually lived up to some hype for once in the post Pete Carrol era
• Massive 4 way tie there towards the back of the pack, I think that’s the first time we’ve seen it?
• OSU, SMU and Iowa all won, but didn’t beat the snot out of their opponents enough to not slide.
• Lots of “receiving votes” this week. Means we are far from unified on spots 20-25 especially