Top 25

rank / team / prior

1 Alabama 1

2 Notre Dame 6

3 Ohio St. 15

4 S Carolina 11

5 Oregon 13

6 W Virginia 7

7 Florida 14

8 Oregon St. 4

9 Kansas St. 3

10 Stanford 9

11 La. Tech –

12 Texas 18

13 Iowa St. –

14 TX Tech –

15 Cincinnati 12

16 Georgia 10

17 Rutgers –

18 Miss. St. 19

19 Louisville –

20 LSU 2

21 Boise St. –

22 Florida St. 5

23 TX A&M –

24 Toledo –

25 Duke –

Out of rankings: (8 ) Washington, (16) UCLA, (17) Nebraska, (20) Clemson,

(21) Mich St., (22) Arizona, (23) Missouri, (24) Wisconsin, (25) Baylor

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A couple of preliminary things. If I were going to do subjective rankings again, LSU was probably going to move down even with a win since I was surprised by Auburn’s loss to Arkansas (and Washington may well lose to Oregon). I thought the final score in that one was going to be the opposite. I’ve also updated the LSU/Florida entry to my rivalry series.

As to this season’s game, I was encouraged by a field goal on the opening drive, but it went almost all downhill offensively from there.

Instead of LSU QB Zach Mettenberger getting better, he seems to have gotten worse since the first couple of weeks of the season. Then he finally makes a good play, and the officials reverse a call from a play being dead to being a fumble with Florida recovering. I didn’t think this was possible, and I further don’t believe there was irrefutable video evidence that the play should not have been ruled dead. Regardless, I never thought it was possible to be credited with a fumble recovery after the whistle blew.

The announcers (Gary Danielson and Verne Lundquist) of course didn’t see any problem with what the refs did. They also didn’t regard the 56-yard completion as a third-down conversion, saying LSU was 0 for 9 at one point (before getting another first down on a screen pass). LSU also got a first down after a third down as a result of a penalty. So yes, LSU was poor on third downs, but there were two situations in which they had first downs; but they’re not being counted, so the 1/13 stat is misleading.

I’m not trying to say it was all about the call even though let’s say I’m skeptical. The way LSU was playing, they would have probably only gotten a field goal, making the final score 14-9 instead. It doesn’t always work that way, but that’s how I think it would have happened.

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Before I start, I wanted to remind people of my LSU/Florida rivalry blog. I update these(the records anyway) after each game. The two teams have played one another for about 40 years in a row, and they were the first two teams to win two BCS titles apiece, so it’s been an interesting last 10 years especially.

This is the week (the week before the first computer ratings) every year where people try to destroy me and everything I stand for sports-wise because I try to be objective, which is bound to ruffle feathers in small doses, so it’s really big when the whole football world is shaken up if one goes by my rankings. Also, people don’t like that this is a change from going more with the flow in prior weeks. We’ve played nearly half a season, time to take the training wheels off, and if there are scraped knees, spray some antiseptic on it and move on. After all, we’re not talking about shuffleboard, we’re talking about football.

I’m going to start with my rankings since I don’t want to confuse people into thinking I’m giving primary importance to what the voters do, but being unhappy with the voters goes all the way back to 1994 for me—and LSU wasn’t even a team at much risk of having a winning record that year—and that’s what got me started with my own rankings system, which started as purely subjective until it got too difficult to be consistent.

I still use subjective measures early in this season, but as is typical, I try to phase out things like preseason projections, historical strength of programs, and margin of victory before I turn it over to my arithmetical rankings system. This happens every year, it has nothing to do with LSU having less-than-impressive score lines the past two weeks.

So how I did it this year was to basically use a blind resume. I looked at which teams have been beaten and when relevant, I looked at losses. I went ahead and put a couple teams in there with more than one loss, because I couldn’t say any of the unranked undefeated or 1-loss teams fall into the category of having beating someone who at this point seems worth much of anything. I’m going to list the rankings now (after three more sentences). I’m going to go on to give some basic responses to things I’m expecting people to say, and then I’m going to talk about how silly it is to keep moving LSU down. I understand this is mostly just preliminary quibbling with so many teams still undefeated, but if LSU is fortunate enough to win this week and someone complains it was too close, they should be laughed at. If LSU loses, I will just have to be grateful that unless it’s like a Spurrier-era score, we will still look better than USC.

Top 25

rank / team / prior
1 Alabama 1
2 LSU 2
3 Kansas St. 5
4 Oregon St. 16
5 Florida St. 6
6 Notre Dame 15
7 W Virginia 8
8 Washington –
9 Stanford 10
10 Georgia 3
11 S Carolina 7
12 Cincinnati 17
13 Oregon 4
14 Florida 14
15 Ohio St. 22
16 UCLA 24
17 Nebraska –
18 Texas 13
19 Miss. St. 19
20 Clemson 20
21 Mich St. –
22 Arizona –
23 Missouri –
24 Wisconsin 18
25 Baylor 21

Out of rankings: (9) USC, (11) Oklahoma, (12) TCU. (23) Michigan, (25) Tennessee

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Note after UW-Stanford: The last time the Huskies defeated a top 10 team was in 2009 over USC, just a couple of weeks after losing to LSU.

(This is obviously the page that inspired this blog.  Sorry to liberally paraphrase the argument, but I wanted to get to the point in a somewhat concise way.)

I’m glad I post things in places where I get some feedback. It reminds me that the opinions of even dedicated sports fans don’t always take into account hard facts but rely in large part on perceptions.

I didn’t have anything special to post this week in addition to my rankings blog and my update to the LSU/Auburn series, so I’ll talk a little more about the change at #2 in the major polls.

Again, let me reiterate that I’m not upset with people having seen the Auburn game or having seen how close the Auburn game was having less confidence in LSU. But I am annoyed with not looking at all the facts and being consistent.

Oregon deserves to be #2, the logic goes, because they beat Arizona. Arizona is good because they were ranked. (this leaves out that Arizona was ranked because they beat Oklahoma St., which was ranked because they were good last year… might as well rank LSU higher for beating Oregon last year, but I digress.)

LSU beat Auburn, who had two prior losses (by 7 on a neutral field against Clemson and by 18 @ Mississippi St.) and was not ranked. LSU does not have a good schedule, people claim, because the week before Auburn, they played Idaho and in the following week, they play Towson.

I think this analysis is extraordinarily flimsy, but it seems enough for a lot of people.

The schedule portion is the most problematic, so I’ll address that first. I ask this. Which of the following is more difficult to navigate undefeated?

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