Blogpollery break, Week 15 or 16

First, a quick thumbs-up to the Blog Poll at large: as the coaches and Harris voters fell victim to Mack Brown's posturing and took votes away from Oklahoma as a reward for pounding a top-15 Oklahoma St. team on the road, we Blog Pollers gave the Sooners their just reward. Whether you side with Texas or Oklahoma in the great Big 12 South Debate of 2008, that it was at heart a three-way tie means it's just not as simple as "Texas beat Oklahoma, done." Blog Poll voters got that; the guys that count didn't.

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Oklahoma	1
2	Florida	2
3	Texas	--
4	Penn State	1
5	Texas Tech	1
6	Southern Cal	1
7	Alabama	6
8	Utah	--
9	Ohio State	--
10	Boise State	--
11	TCU	--
12	Oklahoma State	--
13	Cincinnati	--
14	Georgia Tech	--
15	Oregon	1
16	Oregon State	4
17	Virginia Tech	9
18	Mississippi	1
19	Pittsburgh	2
20	Michigan State	2
21	Iowa	2
22	Georgia	2
23	California	2
24	Boston College	2
25	Northwestern	1

Dropped Out: Ball State (#15), Missouri (#23).

1-2: Oklahoma, and it's not close. The strength just isn't there in the SEC to justify bumping Florida to the top spot, particularly when one of the three remaining SEC teams in the poll actually beat them. I'm giving the Gators a bit of a bonus for their conference title and another bit of a bonus because I think they're the best team in the country by a mile ... but as many quality wins as the Sooners have, Florida's an awful lot closer to No. 3 than No. 1

3-7: Man, it kind of sucks to have to drop 'Bama this far after they were one-half of the best college football game played this season ... but their best win is either at home to Ole Miss or at Georgia, and by contrast every team in front of them has a win over another team in the top 10. Never thought I'd see the day when I'd think "I'd like to give them a little more respect, but they play in the SEC ..."

8-14: None of these teams played.

15-25: OK, so despite not that much happening this week, there's a lot of tweaking at the bottom of the poll:

--Ball St. dropped out. It's tough, but when your best win is either Navy or Western Michigan, you don't get mulligans on bad losses.

--I decided that since Oregon St. has two quality wins (USC, Cal) to Ole Miss and Iowa's one each, and better losses to boot--yeah, Stanford, but that's not so much worse than either Vandy or Wake Forest these days--I should have had them ahead of the Ole Miss-Mich. St.-Iowa grouping last week. Error corrected.

--Likewise, Va. Tech probably should have been in the poll last week at someone's expense, given that the Georgia Tech and (at) Nebraska wins have really appreciated in value and the East Carolina loss is looking understandable again. Add in the new win over BC and a conference title, and up they go.

--Mizzou didn't drop out because of the beatdown from the Sooners; we all saw that coming. They dropped out because I realized how truly awful the Big 12 North is. Georgia hasn't beaten anybody of true consequence, but at least Vandy, Kentucky, South Carolina, and LSU are going bowling. The only in-conference bowl-bound team Missouri's beaten is Nebraska, and whatever that's worth is pretty well canceled out by the Kansas loss. Good-bye, Tigers.

--Pitt's win over UConn and the increased value of the Buffalo win and Rutgers loss was enough to activate the Panthers' head-to-head consideration with Iowa. And get them just past Michigan St. too, I guess.

--Northwestern sneaks in.

Waitlist: BYU's probably the next team in line I haven't mentioned already, but I'd rather have both Ball St. and Mizzou first.

Quick housekeeping note: I know we didn't have quite as much content this past afternoon as in the early stages of coachapalooza--Real Life--but I'll rectify that tomorrow.