BlogPoll has arrived, and the preliminary Cowboys Ride For Free Week 1 ballot is in. Our ballot is what it is, a guess of how good everyone is before anyone has seen them play, but it is in. For those unfamiliar with BlogPoll, check out the site here.
For those that hate clicking, BlogPoll is basically a Blog... Poll. And to take the description straight from the site:
The BlogPoll is structured exactly like the AP and Coaches' polls, except the voting members are active bloggers who write about college football.
Voters submit a draft ballot on Monday that they post on their site. They then solicit feedback from their readers and submit a revised ballot early Wednesday. These ballots are then compiled into the poll Wednesday afternoon.
So we get to all have a voice in a poll that may actually make sense. Take a look at the week 1 ballot below and let us know what you like and what you don't, and we will use that feedback to update our ballot.
As for the in-season rankings, we were thinking of going with some form of a merit based ranking system where each team is rewarded for their performances to date, rather than just shuffling teams up and down around their previous weeks ranking. We were pretty proud of the formula we were developing yesterday when we discovered that someone had beat us to the punch (dicks). We were binging the googles when we stumbled upon the SBNation Iowa blog at about 1:00 CST yesterday to discover that they had posted their ranking system which was pretty similar in methodology to ours. How they overheard our conversation, then stole our idea and applied our method to their rankings from 2009, then posted about it yesterday is still unclear, but what is clear is that this is the first time someone has ever had the same idea as someone else on the internet. This is not to say we still won't do it, we are just a little saddened by the fact that we will not be pioneers (feel bad for us).
So in addition to letting us know what you think about the week 1 poll, let us know your views on rankings in general, what you feel should dictate teams being rewarded and punished in the rankings, and how we can come up with some method that ensures all Big 10 teams will drop out of the polls after week 1.
CowboysRideForFree Ballot - Week 1
| Rank | Team | Delta |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alabama Crimson Tide | -- |
| 2 | Texas Longhorns | -- |
| 3 | Florida Gators | -- |
| 4 | Boise St. Broncos | -- |
| 5 | Ohio St. Buckeyes | -- |
| 6 | TCU Horned Frogs | -- |
| 7 | Oklahoma Sooners | -- |
| 8 | Virginia Tech Hokies | -- |
| 9 | Oregon Ducks | -- |
| 10 | Iowa Hawkeyes | -- |
| 11 | Penn St. Nittany Lions | -- |
| 12 | Miami Hurricanes | -- |
| 13 | LSU Tigers | -- |
| 14 | USC Trojans | -- |
| 15 | Pittsburgh Panthers | -- |
| 16 | Wisconsin Badgers | -- |
| 17 | Nebraska Cornhuskers | -- |
| 18 | Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets | -- |
| 19 | Arkansas Razorbacks | -- |
| 20 | Georgia Bulldogs | -- |
| 21 | Florida St. Seminoles | -- |
| 22 | North Carolina Tar Heels | -- |
| 23 | West Virginia Mountaineers | -- |
| 24 | Utah Utes | -- |
| 25 | Oregon St. Beavers | -- |
SB Nation BlogPoll College Football Top 25 Rankings "