Thursday, June 19

The not-so-random 25, take two.

Since the debut of the composite preseason top 25, I've dug up a few new rankings and figured I might as well throw them into the mix. One of them, incidentally, is courtesy of EDSBS's own Orson Swindle, who gets to take his place at the big-boy table amongst all those other sage authorities of the mainstream (or semi-mainstream) media. I included him for two reasons: He runs a wildly popular blog that's respected by media types and average Joes alike; he's apparently considered authoritative enough that the Sporting News felt safe giving him a regular outlet; and I'm hoping he'll give me a guest-blogging spot one of these days. OK, so three reasons. But anyway, we've now got 14 sets of top 25s in this thing, all of them having been banged out after spring practice, so this should be a reasonably accurate preview of what we can expect the eventual AP and USA Today preseason rankings to look like.

The full details can be viewed on this spreadsheet; meanwhile, the (only slightly) revised top 25 is:

1. Ohio State (6 first-place votes)
2. Georgia (5)
3. Southern California (1)
4. Oklahoma
5. Florida (2)
6. Missouri
7. West Virginia
8. LSU
9. Clemson
10. Texas
11. Auburn
12. Texas Tech
13. Wisconsin
14. Kansas
15. Brigham Young
16. Arizona State
17. Illinois
18. Tennessee
19. Virginia Tech
20. South Florida
21. Oregon
22. Penn State
23. Pittsburgh
24. Wake Forest
25. Fresno State

Others receiving votes: Oregon State, Alabama, Michigan State, Utah, Notre Dame, South Carolina, Florida State, Boston College*, Connecticut, California, Cincinnati, Michigan*, Rutgers, Colorado*, North Carolina*, Boise State, Florida Atlantic*, Southern Methodist*. (* = new since last version)

"Ballots" that are new to this version:

NOLA -- New Orleans Times-Picayune (David Gladow), May 12
EDSBS -- SportingNews.com/Every Day Should Be Saturday (Orson Swindle), June 6
RAY -- Raycom Sports, June 11
SF -- Statfox, June 17

· Changes: Clemson and LSU switch places at 8 and 9; South Florida and Oregon switch places at 20 and 21; Pitt and Wake Forest switch places at 23 and 24. That's it.

· The long, lonely droughts of Boston College and Michigan are over, as both finally found themselves on a top 25 list (Raycom's); however, both are still a long way from cracking the aggregate top 25.

· Fourteen lists means a total of 140 top-ten slots, and they're still distributed among only 15 different teams, so again, there seems to be a lot of agreement with respect to who's top-10 caliber and who's not. I'm not a statistician, nor do I even play one on TV, but I'd be very surprised if the eventual "official" preseason top tens differed substantially from the one above.

· The one vote for Florida Atlantic came from the Times-Picayune's David Gladow; a bit of a stretch, perhaps, but FAU does return 18 starters from a team that won the Sun Belt and pounded Memphis in a bowl game last year, so who knows. As for the Southern Methodist vote, that was Swindle's. Yeah, I know, I know; I guess we should just be glad his #25 vote didn't go to Duke.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Haven't been following all your logic in the revisiting past playoffs, and such (I do read you at work, and if I took the time to think it all out, they would stop issuing those paychecks!) but I like the end results! Go Bucks