Underground Resume Ranking Report – Week 6

(Through the games of Oct. 4)

“Craig, you’re making noises over there.”

This week’s rankings are brought to you by our generous sponsors:
Craig James’ unexplainable odd noises
The Wannstache’s coaching lifeline
Spitgate

Dropped: Connecticut, South Florida, Auburn, Virginia Tech

Just Missed: TCU, Connecticut, Illinois, Florida, Virginia Tech, Oregon, Oregon State

Comments, Concerns, and General Shenanigans

Thursdays are for losing
Like last year’s unlucky #2 ranking, this year it seems to be dangerous to be a favorite playing on a Thursday night. Break out the conspiracies that ESPN is paying teams to give them compelling games. South Carolina, Rutgers, Kansas State, USC, and now South Florida, have all lost on Thursday night this season. Add in Oregon State almost pulling off two in a row this week and it looks like we’ve got a clear trend. Is Wake Forest the next to go down?

Oddities and Eccentricities
We’re finally getting enough accumulated data that the rankings are starting to look pretty respectable. Northwestern is still up there, although they dropped a few spots with a bye. Minnesota somehow snuck into the bottom of the ranking. Granted, they are 5-1, but their mathematical best win is against Bowling Green. They travel to Illinois this weekend, so a win there (which won’t happen) would validate the current ranking.

Racking up the mileage
The biggest mover by a landslide this week is Missouri after their absolute shellacking of Nebraska and the ensuing playground-style name calling between Chase Daniels and Bo Pelini. Speaking of that game, we already know someone’s going to call us out on Nebraska moving up one spot. We covered some of it last week when Georgia moved up after losing, but we’ll say it again: look at the entire season’s resume, not just the results from last week.

Conference Wars
There were only two moves this week in the conference rankings. The ACC moved ahead of the Pac 10, mostly due to the black hole of football that is the state of Washington. Also, the Mountain West Conference has finally relinquished their spot in the middle of the BCS conferences. The conference still boasts three very good teams in Utah, BYU, and TCU, but the rest of the conference is starting to weigh them down too much.

Bottom of the Barrel
Speaking of the state of Washington, we felt it would be interesting to look at who ranks at the bottom of the FBS with the UR3 formula. Washington and North Texas share the bottom spot by default for failing to schedule a cupcake easy enough to pick up a win. After that, we get in order from the bottom-up: Idaho, UL-Monroe, UAB, Kent State, and Ohio University.

That’s it for this week. Happy weekending!