The above of course is my ballot; this week's BlogPoll is available for your perusal here

• How I ranked it this week: I took all the unbeaten teams, and all the 1-1 teams with a "good" loss, and power ranked the hell out of them. Simple enough. Didn't consult the AP/coaches polls, my previous BlogPoll entry, or any other ranking system. Just intuition and who-ya-beat. I wish I could claim it was more complicated or intellectual than that, but I can't.

• The main issue here, to me, is that there appears to be a slight dropoff of quality after #4, and an even bigger gap once you reach #11 or #12 or so. Which leads to crazy things like Cincinnati moving up to 12 spots after a win over a I-AA team.

• Most impressive: I've had USC as my #2 team all three weeks, so it's nice to see them pull out a win on the road against the Buckeyes. Matt Barkley will need to be better, but luckily, since this is SC, he's bound to have a clunker against a bad Pac-10 team, thereby derailing the Trojans' national title hopes.

• Honorable mention: Miami (wish Jacory Harris was my team's QB), Michigan (wish Tate Forcier was my team's QB), California (wish they could all be California girls)

• I apologize for that joke.

• Least impressive: The big down-mover this week is, obviously, Oklahoma State. I considered them dropping out of the poll entirely, but Georgia's still a decent scalp to own. OSU gets three cupcakes in a row, and they'll probably move up the poll, but they're the stereotypical example of a no-defense Big 12 team.

• Honorable mention: Pretty much everybody in the bottom half of the poll. There's going to be a lot of flux (read: a lot of ranked 8-4 teams) as everybody loses to teams of relatively comparitive quality. Love that parity. Specific mention goes to North Carolina (no offense), Notre Dame (no defense), and Texas College (no way does the NAIA school who lost a game 92-0 last weekend have a quarterback named X'Zavier Bloodsaw. I refuse to believe something that awesome actually exists.)
• The Houston thing: They probably should be on this poll in place of Oklahoma State. Yeah. Fully acknowledge that. It's pure anti-mid-major bias that the Cougars remain ranked below OSU despite a pretty conclusive win in Stillwater. Although I'm more likely to get rid of Oklahoma State from the poll instead of adding Houston (one of those weird questions you have to ask yourself as a power-pollster: why should Houston get extra credit because we overestimated OSU's quality?)
• The Notre Dame thing: I think they're still 8/9-win good. I think Michigan could be good. A good Michigan team needed late-game heroics (and poor clock management) to beat a 9-win team at home. Thus, the Irish hang on to the back-end of the poll.

Fire at will.