Note:  Clicking a team link in this blog will show you how everyone voted for that team.  Clicking a voter name link will show you their ballot.

Wisconsin earned some serious style points this week.  By “style points”, I mean stylishly destroying Indiana 83 to 20!  Getting that many points has to impress everyone.  It definitely impressed the voters since the Badgers remain the highest ranked one-loss team in the BCS human polls (No. 5).  However, it didn’t impress the computers one byte.  BCS computers are mandated to exclude margin of victory in their rankings.  In fact, the computers actually dropped Wisconsin an average of two places from last week (from 10 to 12).  BCS computers have no sense of style.

Outside the top four, there are two ranked, non-BCS teams:  Utah and Nevada.  This week’s polls, particularly the Coaches’ Poll, are a lesson in just how important record is to ranking.  If you remove, Utah and Nevada, every other team falls in line based on their record:  the first four teams have no losses, the next 7 have one loss, the next 5 have two losses, and the last seven have three losses.  The other polls aren’t quite as delineated as the Coaches’ Poll, but they’re close.

It’s safe to say that the number-one factor in determining a team’s ranking is its record.  That’s why Pollspeak always advocates using head-to-head results as a tie-breaker only when two teams have the same number of losses.  On that note…

Head to Head Lines:

The ACC is a bit tricky to figure out this season.  Especially when there are four teams with 7-3 records that have only one head-to-head result each:  NC State, Florida State, Maryland and Miami.   Maryland only received one vote this week in the AP, so let’s focus on the other three:

·         NC State beat Florida State

·         Florida State beat Miami

·         NC State and Miami don’t play

They all have the same record, so in the makeshift playoff we call the regular season, the teams should be ranked in this order:

·         NC State

·         Florida State

·         Miami

However, all three human polls have Miami on top, Harris Interactive has FSU at No. 25 and none of them have NC State in the top 25.  It’s exactly the opposite of the head-to-head order.  That means a bunch of people got it wrong; however, there are so many wrongdoers, I’m going to try something different.  I’m going to give kudos to all of those who got it right.  Here is their chance to stand out and shine in the bright spotlight:

Andy Staples, Chad Cripe, Chip Cosby, Chris Fowler, Desmond Connor, Doug Lesmerises, Jon Solomon, Kirk Herbstreit, Kyle Tucker, Mark Anderson, Randy Rosetta, Ray Ratto, Travis Haney, Wes Rucker

The following people MAY have gotten it right, but since they didn’t rank ANY of the three teams, it’s hard to give them full credit:

Bill Cole, Bob Asmussen, Bob Hammond, Brett McMurphy, Ferd Lewis, Jack Bogaczyk, Joe Giglio, John Shinn, Kyle Veazey, Mike DeArmond, Scott Wolf, Steve Conroy, Tom Murphy

That’s still only 14 out of 60 voters who got it right and 13 more who maybe got it right.  More than half of the voters got at least one pair wrong based on head-to-head results.  OK, I can’t go without at least one tiny, off-handed mention of one person who got it all wrong:

The Voter who has it most backwards is

TOM KEEGAN, OF THE LAWRENCE JOURNAL WORLD

who has Miami at No. 22, Florida State at No. 25 and NC State unranked. 

For some reason, people tend to focus on the negatives about voters, so I hope Pollspeak readers appreciate this attempt to highlight the positives.