Rank	Team	Delta
1	Alabama
2	Texas
3	Florida
4	Cincinnati	2
5	Boise State
6	LSU	1
7	Virginia Tech	3
8	Miami (Florida)	10
9	Southern Cal	1
10	Ohio State	1
11	Iowa	1
12	TCU	3
13	Penn State	1
14	Missouri
15	Auburn
16	Oregon	1
17	Oklahoma State	5
18	South Carolina
19	Michigan	6
20	Notre Dame	3
21	Wisconsin
22	South Florida	6
23	Brigham Young	1
24	Georgia Tech
25	Georgia	4
Last week's ballot

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Dear God, do I hate everybody in this poll after No. 8 or so.

Surprisingly, it's only taken six weeks for me to become disillusioned with polling and Top 25s in general. I thought I'd make it to late October at least.

Maybe it's because I rank the teams every week starting from a tabula rasa; instead of using last week's ballot as a guide, I choose the 30-35 teams that warrant consideration based on record and/or team strength and/or whether their schedule is responsible for a 2-2 record. From there, I look at who beat who and who lost to who, and try to come up with a semi-coherent ballot.

And while that's all well and good, I am just amazed that this is how we determine (who plays for) the national championship in this sport. I know, not exactly a new realization or anything, but I am sort of a newbie in this process.

Polling, I'm finding, is a paradoxical enterprise. If you rank by a team's perceived strength, you're subject to all sorts of confirmation bias and selective reasoning, wherein you'll look for any excuse to keep the "best" teams near the top. See: anybody who has Oklahoma ranked in the top 25 with wins over Tulsa and Idaho State and losses to the two decent teams they've faced.

In a nutshell, this is why Boise State can't have nice things. They beat everybody, but they play nobody, and thus are subject to the glass ceiling. Which means we'll never know how Boise would do against Florida or Texas in a winner-take-all situation.

If you rank purely by resume, you're just ranking by opponents' perceived strength, which does not eliminate the aforementioned problems. It also adds a new problem: if UConn beats No. 5 Cincinnati, does that mean UConn is the fourth-best team in the country or does it mean that Cincinnati is more like the 15th? If Cincinnati is 15th-best, doesn't that mean UConn is at least 14th? Or does it mean that UConn played over their heads for one day, meaning they've "earned" a ranking of 22 or 23? And doesn't that mean that rankings are just rewards and penalties based on the most recent information, which invalidates the whole idea of polls deciding the "best" team?

But if Cincinnati's really the 15th-best, what does that say about Fresno State and Oregon State, both of whom were (fairly) soundly beaten by the Bearcats? And in turn, how does that effect the teams that Fresno and Oregon State have beaten?

It gets to the point where you'd almost like to say "screw it" and design a computer program to work out the complex mathematical calculations, because human polling is silly and filled with irregularities...until you realize the true purpose of polling, which is to be a silly, entertaining distraction filled with irregularities to discuss during the days of the week which contain no college football.

And all that would be fine and well, as long as you're not taking any particular ballot seriously. Except that, in the screwed-up universe of Division I-A football, the people - the coaches and Harris voters, anyway - who produce these silly, irregular polls are actually primarily responsible for (arbitrarily) deciding which two teams will play in the game we have agreed decides the national champion.

That is dumb. I'm sure there is a more elegant way to say it, but I like to be pointed. If Division I-A wants to have a recognized national champion - and judging from the addition of a game called "The BCS National Championship Game" in the last couple years, I think it does - the means currently in use to obtain that end are just dumb.

Which means either we need to go back to the old bowl system - where "mythical national championship" was taken literally and occasionally one of the top two teams was locked into the Rose Bowl - or we need to get a committee to seed the 11 conference champions and the five best at-large teams and play until we have a winner, who will be recognized as undisputed champion.

Anyways, that's my "Hey, I'm a UConn fan and I'm learning about college football!" rant, and that's the poll.

Alabama, Texas and Florida appear to be better than everybody else, which of course means all three will lose somewhere along the way. Everything after that is a crapshoot, though if I could have kept spots 10-15 blank and only ranked 20 teams, I would have.

As always, your thoughts are always welcome.