College Football

As always a few notes:

• No top TENnessee sad vol noises
• Also it hurt to let bama have the tie breaker over the vols, and I kinda want y'all to acknowledge how brave I am for facing my fears like that
• "State" schools seem to be having a moment, other than Michigan State, which is having it's own moment
• Arkansas and Iowa are tied and neither were ranked last week. I put Arkansas in the 24 spot as they received 11 votes last week to Iowa's 10
• Lastly you may have noticed a new column this week. That's because this is a real ballot somebody took the time to open 25 drop down menus and submit:

1. Louisville
2. Troy
3. Baylor
4. Cinicinnati
5. Ohio State
6. Kansas State
7. UTEP
8. Mississippi State
9. Appalachian State
10. Navy
11. Liberty
12. Miami (OH)
13. Hawaii
14. Fresno State
15. Jacksonville State
16. Georgia State
17. FIU
18. Ball State
19. East Carolina
20. Costal Carolina
21. Central Michigan
22. BYU
23. Akron
24. Arkansas State
25. Army

I want to be as hands off this data as possible, but it just didn't sit right ranking Troy and Baylor because of the strangest ballot I've ever seen. And it just raises so many questions in my mind. Who are you? Do you actually think Troy has a good football team? Were you that drunk that you don't even know? Were you a traveler who just thought they would participate in this small community but doesn't know football? Are you a buckeye that was trying to subtly boost tOSU's points? Are you doing a bit? Were you doing this specifically to fuck with me? Because it worked. I haven't been sleeping since I saw this. But whoever you are if you have a legit system that gave you these rankings let me know and I'll rework the table. The results tab on the spreadsheet shared in the post will keep that entry but the table above was scored without that entry.

And to who it may concern:

I'm okay with ties (but I'm also a weirdo who thinks games should be able to tie and is okay with split national champions). IIRC, r/cfb had the occasional tie and split the #10 spot in half -- but they had tons of voters so that was rare. I think if we get to, say, 20ish regular voters then I would suggest allowing them.

Kind of bummed we already seem to have gotten a throwaway ballot, and surprised it wouldn't have messed up the poll too much given our small sample size (although it would have made a mess of "others receiving votes"). If they really wanted to manipulate the poll, they could have been more crafty about it and then we would have had to keep it. I think you made the right call here, but we should probably set up some guidelines for throwing out ballots. I don't know if it would be too much work, but if they are missing more than, say, 5 teams on the otherwise final rankings then I would say it should be thrown out. The criteria could be looser than that if only a few games were played (and in the preseason I like it being a free-for-all).

10. Alabama 121
11. Tennessee 121

Considering that one of those teams lost their game and the other won their game (not without some hiccups), I feel like the true #10 is obvious. Although I wish we did ties so that we could get a 50/50 Bama/Tennessee logo at #10 in the banner.