Bad ballots in the AP poll
As usual, a lot of the voters are really lazy and may not have even be aware of our games. And unsurprisingly, Parrish Alford underranks us. What a clown.
I've identified 3 groups of teams that should clearly be ranked below us:
- LSU - obviously. Maybe over the course of the year, their resume will be better than ours, but not yet.
- Several non-P5 teams that fail both the eye test (clearly none of these teams would go into Tiger Stadium and win) and the resume test (these teams have - AT BEST - beaten up on other bad teams:
- Army - beat Middle Tennessee and Louisiana-Monroe and then lost to Cincinnati
- BYU - blew out a bad Navy team and Troy. Not impressed yet.
- Louisiana-Lafayette - The Iowa State win was good, but then they needed overtime to beat Georgia State and a 53-yard field goal to beat Georgia Southern.
- Marshall - beat Eastern Kentucky and Appalachian State. Big whoop.
- SMU - beat Texas State, North Texas, and Stephen F. Austin and that's enough to get votes??
- UAB - got blown out by Miami and beat Central Arkansas and South Alabama. OK, why would anyone rank them?
- Big 10/Pac-12 teams. I realize that they're allowed to be ranked, and I won't fault the voters for including them necessarily, since SEC teams were included last week before we had played, but come on, Minnesota, USC, Iowa, Utah, Washington?
Unfortunately, many writers ranked us below LSU, or below some of the other teams. You can see the regional bias of many of the voters. A lot of these should just be embarrassed. I'm fairly certain that most of these near the top of the chart either forgot or never knew that we beat LSU yesterday.
https://i.imgur.com/wcrjgqa.png
