Underground Resume Ranking – Week 5

Dropped: Florida, Wisconsin, UCLA, Colorado, Fresno State, Georgia Tech, UNLV

Just Missed: Oregon, Missouri, Oregon State, TCU, Duke, Fresno State, Florida

Comments, Concerns, and General Shenanigans

Adventures in Wack-Balloteering
Does anyone want to win the national championship? Realllllly? You could’ve fooled us this past weekend with USC, Florida, Wisconsin, Wake Forest, and Georgia all losing. Our guess is that they all decided to play a practical joke on us to make our job hard. The good news is that, five weeks into the season, the rankings are starting to make a bit more sense, even with the attempts of the aforementioned teams to screw with us. There are still a couple strange ones in the rankings, but slowly things are starting to look clearer.

Oddities and Eccentricities
At least UCLA is gone. This week’s oddball is probably Northwestern, but for a different reason than UCLA was last week. Northwestern has certainly earned the ranking, and not through a loophole in the formula, but really? Northwestern? They’ve beaten Duke and Iowa, but we’re still not sure how that ranks the Wildcats so high. They’re off this weekend, which unfortunately means they’ll stay in the rankings for another week.

Racking up the mileage
The biggest positive mover of the week is Texas, after their win over Arkansas. It’s not the most impressive of wins, considering Oklahoma thoroughly dominated a very good TCU team and Alabama led Georgia by 31 at the half IN ATHENS. The important thing to remember is that these rankings are relative, so even though Bama only gained 6 spots, a) they couldn’t have gained any more, and b) their rating dropped a fairly substantial 12 points. Other winners this week include Northwestern and Penn State, who both won moderately valuable conference wins, and South Florida, whose win over NC State somehow vaulted them into 13th from outside the top 25 last week.

Conference Wars
Overall there’s not too much change in the conference rankings this week. The Big 10 jumped up to 2nd, but we’re 100% sure that’s due to conference play beginning. The Mountain West Conference is starting to fall, probably for the same reason.

Loophole Watch
Washington’s the only team left that exploited the loophole, sitting in approximately the 7th spot. Somehow a loss to Stanford wasn’t enough to kick them out for good, but it’s probably good enough to spell the end of Ty Willingham’s tenure at the helm.