Week 2 - WTF, Internet

So I'm sure you saw the rankings. Yeah.

I imagine you're pretty puzzled as to why South Carolina is the number one ranked team in the country right now, according to The Internet.  I gotta admit, I'm pretty puzzled as well.  Louisville ranked second is also pretty damn high (although at least they're a ranked team).  The Internet explains it like this: according to Its research, the majority of people think that it's very important in determining ranks to determine "quality of opponents."  I counter that the quality of opponent that South Carolina has faced is not really that strong.

The Internet asks me in response to this, "by what objective measure?"  I point to the Elo and the scoring system that It Itself has derived.  It states that at this time, that scoring system is still in its beta phase, and it's not sure about its efficacy.  The Internet loves Elo systems, but it also says that since that villain Nate Silver did not share his proprietary Elo rankings with us, we are doing it from scratch.  Since we're doing it from scratch, the system is not ready yet.  "Therefore, without confidence in the rating formula, and with the Elo still needing some time to establish itself, neither of those two can be considered the dominant ranking system [although it should be stated that The Internet did use its current formula to establish differences between tied teams).  The only thing that can be firmly established is that South Carolina and Louisville have quality wins against two 'power five' conference members, so therefore they should be at the top of the chart.'  Incidentally, that is why Ohio State is ranked last.  The Internet told me it didn't consider ranking them at all.  However, it felt that since it did have a win against a power conference team already, and that it firmly established itself as a ranked team, it should have its place at the bottoms of the rak

Exasperating.  Hopefully the internet will come to its senses in future weeks.

Oh, I realized, that although the bottom of this article contains the current 25, it isn't really a snapshot of what the rankings are at the moment of writing.  So I've thought to include that at the bottom.

1 South Carolina 
2 Louisville
3 Clemson  
3 Michigan 
3 Alabama 
6 Virgina Tech 
6 Oklahoma 
6 USC 
6 Maryland
6 Washington 
6 Washington State
13 UCLA 
14 California 
14 Tennessee
14 Duke 
14 TCU 
18 Minnesota 
18 Penn State  
20 Wake Forest  
21 Ohio State