CBSsports.com BlogPoll Week 9 Draft

A whole lot of shakeups this weekend require an awful lot of use of "smell testing" to ask the question, who just had a bad week and who was over/underrated.  Sometimes I wanted to move teams down more...but then struggled to find someone that I thought was better.  As always, your feedback is welcome...especially those of you who respond before Wednesday morning, when this ballot goes final.

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Alabama
2	Florida
3	Texas
4	Cincinnati
5	TCU	1
6	Georgia Tech	3
7	Boise State
8	LSU	3
9	Miami (Florida)	4
10	Oregon	2
11	Ohio State	4
12	Southern Cal
13	Iowa	2
14	Arizona	2
15	Houston	3
16	Texas Tech	3
17	Pitt	3
18	Virginia Tech	3
19	Clemson	5
20	Penn State	6
21	Oklahoma	11
22	Arkansas
23	Utah	2
24	Oklahoma State
25	Stanford
Last week's ballot

Dropped Out: California (#17), Notre Dame (#23).

I'm still not entirely sold on Boise State, but it's one of those things where I'm not ready to move anybody else ahead of them.  LSU's two losses are 9 and 10 point losses to Florida and Alabama.  Find me another team with two better losses to rank above them, please.  Oregon stays in the top ten because Stanford isn't that bad and it can be explained as a hangover game.

Iowa's loss can be explained by the injury to Robert Stanzi, so I'm not going to penalize them much more than I already have. The new "fad team" in the BCS mix is Pitt.  I think they're overrated, and it's hard for me to give much credit to any coach endorsed by Steve Pederson.


And yep, I'm keeping Oklahoma in the rankings for now.  Yes they have 4 losses, but those losses are by 12 points total.  Contrast that to Ohio State, who lost to Purdue, and people still want to rank in the top ten!  Arkansas too; my smell test keeps them above some other three loss teams.


Big XII PowerPoll

1. Texas
2. Texas Tech
   
3. Oklahoma
   
4. Oklahoma State
5. Nebraska
6. Kansas State
7. Missouri
8. Kansas
9. Texas A&M
   
10. Iowa State
11. Baylor
12. Colorado

Right now, I'm still keeping Oklahoma in 3rd place because of their strong performance against Texas.  Can I really rank Okie State ahead of the Sooners after the Longhorns pasted them in Stillwater?  Nebraska gets a bump to fifth on the basis of Saturday night.  After Kansas State, a huge chasm awaits where you'd almost like to rank them all 12th for one reason or another.  So I have to go back and apply the smell test.  I don't think Missouri is as bad as the others, though they've played that way the last couple of weeks.  A&M is skitzoid, shocking us one week by looking like a top 4 team, then losing to Colorado the next.  And we already know how bad Colorado is.