College football rankings: Tailgater top 25, week 6

We have a race in the SEC East: QB Connor Shaw and tailback Marcus Lattimore led South Carolina to a convincing win over Georgia while the stout Florida defense controlled Zach Mettenberger and the LSU Tigers (left to right: AP/ Flashnick, Getty/ Greenwood)

Tailgater Top 25 Rankings, Week 5

Rankings are obviously a product of opinion.  For the most part, each individual’s top 25 is merely his or her beliefs about the college football landscape translated to paper.  Some of us try to reflect what has actually happened on the field versus what is probably true in order to avoid getting caught up in hypotheticals.  Then again, some don’t seem to worry too much about such pitfalls.

Let’s talk about Glenn Guilbeau of the Shreveport Times.

Glenn’s week 7 poll goes well beyond opinion, ending up in that fantasy land of indefensible decisions that we see all too often in college football.  He’s hardly alone in his absurdity; Glenn is merely the example we happened across this week.  But what an example he is.  Polls like these make you wonder how on earth these guys are permitted to keep their votes.

For a bit of perspective, here are Guilbeau’s week 6 rankings along with his week 7 poll.  The bolding is my own and addresses some of the particularly outrageous choices:

Where do I even begin?  The week 6 monstrosity is bad enough.  Despite the fact that the Buckeyes almost lost to Cal and despite their obviously one-dimensional offense, Guilbeau pegs them as a top 10 team.  Meanwhile South Carolina, which had rolled everyone it played other than Vanderbilt (in a game that saw QB Connor Shaw leave with an injury), trailed Ohio State.  The Washington Huskies were good enough for 12th after beating Stanford– I’ll talk more about Washington in a moment– while those Cardinal were still good enough to be 13th despite that loss.

Undefeated Florida languished down in 18th, a mere one spot ahead of 2-loss teams Michigan State and Michigan.  Bear in mind that the Spartans were coming off of their home loss to OSU while idle Michigan had been stifled by Notre Dame a week prior.  Yet both of those Big Ten reps were evidently better than Clemson, which had only lost to Guilbeau’s #2 team.

Confused yet?  You should be.  Nothing about that order makes any sense whatsoever.  Luckily, it gets worse.

Week 7 must have been an awakening of sorts for Guilbeau, who suddenly realized that South Carolina, Kansas State, and Florida are actually good.  He was only a few weeks behind the rest of us there, so perhaps we can forgive him for that particular transgression.  What isn’t forgivable is leaving Texas at #8; the Longhorns fell to West Virginia and showed major defensive weaknesses in consecutive games. That defeat didn’t matter much to Glenn, who docked them only a single spot in the poll.

Also dropping one spot?  The aforementioned Washington Huskies.

Didn’t Washington get carved up by Oregon?  Indeed it did, and, in fact, that was the Huskies’ second blowout loss of the year.  Guilbeau’s 13th best team in all the land was excoriated by the LSU Tigers 41-3 a few weeks before getting blown up by the Ducks 52-21.  But hey, what are those two measly losses compared to a win over mighty Stanford?

Such must be Guilbeau’s reasoning, if we can call it that.  Washington is a two-loss team that was postively routed twice, yet it ranks 13th?  That just might be the most insulting, asinine ranking I’ve seen in a number of years. 

Stanford hung in there as well, even though the Cardinal almost (and should have) lost to Arizona.  Both of these Pac 12 teams remained in front of undefeated Notre Dame.  No, that’s not a trick of the light.  Guilbeau has decided that Washington is somehow better than the Irish, even after Notre Dame pasted Miami 41-3 on Saturday.

At least one-loss Clemson managed to leapfrog the Spartans and Wolverines.  On the other hand, MSU and Michigan are now joined by fellow two-loss Big Ten chump (and I say that with the utmost love as a lifelong Big Ten fan…) Nebraska.  By the way, undefeated Louisville is barely worth mentioning either time, according to Glenn.

Out of this pile of crap, a few interesting observations emerge.  First, Florida jumped from 18th to 7th with one win.  It was indeed a huge win, and it just happened to be over Guilbeau’s hometown team.  Another LSU coincidence is that the Huskies, who remain so beloved to Guilbeau while lacking any real virtue on the field, fell to the Bayou Bengals and therefore count toward LSU’s strength of schedule.  But surely Guilbeau wouldn’t be trying to artificially elevate the Huskies in order to increase the apparent quality of that LSU win. Surely Florida’s jump was based on more than wanting LSU to have lost to a highly-ranked foe. 

Surely.

The third thing I noticed isn’t directly related to the SEC.  It’s that Mr. Guilbeau apparently doesn’t actually watch or follow much college football.  Are you paying attention, AP?  Do you see the result of this system, the damage that a single voter can do?

With the hope that we are slightly less horrific in our ability to adequately assess teams, here are our updated rankings for week 6.

Bigalke:
1-10: My top three stay the same. Nothing else seems to be in order after a wild weekend. Out go Florida State and Georgia from the top five after the way both lost this weekend — FSU in an upset, UGA in a rout. In come Notre Dame, who walloped Miami, and West Virginia. Trending upward are Louisville, Oregon State and South Carolina, all still undefeated and in the thick of conference races. Louisiana Tech looks like a legitimate BCS Buster, and they can prove it once again next week against Texas A&M in Shreveport. Finishing the top ten is Ohio State, the only team I’ve deemed worthy of ranking from the Big Ten… and don’t BOTH those names sound like a misnomer this year?!