Week 6 - Seperation

Finally this week, the Internet felt some seperation between teams.  There's still a lot of ties, but, the ties are over smaller spreads and The Internet comfortably feels there's a distinct spread of roughly 25 teams to rank.

I saw some teams on the list that surprised me.  Cincinatti is less surprising when you see that they are unbeaten, but Troy also making the list is quite a surprise even though they have that one loss. The Internet maintains that they have a big win, and have done well against their conference (even factoring in that it's a weaker conference) and that is the formula to get on the top 25.  Well, it's hard to argue with that.

California had a huge fall, and Wisconsin made it back on the list, because The Interent decided that BYU was no longer a "major team."  Since college football ranks, according to The Interent's research, mostly seemingly ignore wins and  forgive losses to teams that are not super relevant, the rankings did the same.  Which brought Wisconsin back on the board, and catered California into the 40s (their loss to Arizona, and achieving their second loss of the seaosn, of course, was also a major factor in that).  It actually helped Arizona, as well, I noticed, as they are on the verge of being ranked (29 according to The Interent's system) which I think is funny, because I know they aren't that good, as much as I wish they were.

Next season, The Interent thinks it wants to somehow account for the fact that G5 schools are not given a fair shot.  The problem is that the spirit of college football rankings seems to so strongly favor the idea that beating power five teams and doing well in a power 5 conference is the way to be ranked, that it's hard to seperate all of this.  My suggestion is going to treat the worst team of each conference--the teams that are unequivcably as bad as G5 schools--the way they should be treated. It'll be interesting to see if that's possible.  For what it's worth, the Elo comes the closest to most fairly determining this. 

Woof, rambled on quite a bit this entry.  Anyway, here are the rankings for the week, for posterity: