Down go the Trojans! But will Washington crack the NWO Top 25?

Once again, we have a big shake up at the top of the rankings as USC enters a free-fall after their loss to Washington. To see just how far the Trojans fell, and the rest of our Week 3 ballot here at NittanyWhiteOut, click through.

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Florida
2	Texas	1
3	Alabama	1
4	Penn State	2
5	Mississippi	2
6	California	5
7	LSU	1
8	Boise State	1
9	Miami (Florida)	13
10	Oklahoma	2
11	Virginia Tech	2
12	Ohio State	2
13	Southern Cal	11
14	Cincinnati	7
15	Georgia	3
16	Oklahoma State	3
17	Florida State
18	TCU	1
19	Michigan	1
20	North Carolina	3
21	Brigham Young	16
22	Oregon
23	UCLA
24	Kansas
25	Houston
Last week’s ballot

Dropped Out: Georgia Tech (#14), Oregon State (#15), Utah (#16), Missouri (#24), Nebraska (#25).

One Hit Wonders: After just the first week of play, we wondered aloud if this might be the year of the BCS Buster.  BYU took out a top 5 team in Oklahoma, Boise State knocked off what was supposed to be a Pac-10 contender in Oregon, and remembering the season of a year ago, Utah and TCU were top 20 teams.  But Week 3 was not a good one for the non-BCS conference teams.  BYU stays in our ballot, but suffers an unceremonious 16 point drop from the top 10 to the bottom 5 after a drubbing in Provo at the hands of Florida State.  Utah now finds themselves on the outside looking in after falling to what now looks like a pedestrian Oregon team.  Boise State just barely survived a challenge from Fresno State, and looks very beatable, though they maintain a spot in our top 10.  TCU hasn’t faced much of a challenge yet, but faced with a visit to Death Valley to play a solid Clemson team, they could find themselves a week from today in the same position as Utah is now.  Personally, I’m very disappointed with how low we collectively ranked Houston, who beat Oklahoma State two weeks ago, but wasn’t represented in our Week 2 ballot.  As it turned out, it was my ranking of the Cougars at #18 that kept them on the ballot, though barely, at #25.

Change, nothing stays the same: With our former #2, USC, losing to an unranked team, a ripple was sent throughout our entire ballot.  As such, no team, with the exception of our consensus #1 in Florida, is in the same spot they occupied a week ago.  The big winners is Cal, who moves up to #6 and becomes the top-ranked Pac-10 school in our ballot after an impressive over Minnesota.  Jahvid Best ran for 5 touchdowns in that one and if he’s not the best player in the NCAA, he’s certainly close.  The bad news, at least for some of us out there, is that the Hurricanes are back.  Personally, I can’t stand “The U,” but Miami jumps into our top 10 with their second impressive win of the year. They simply manhandled Georgia Tech last week, and Jacory Harris looks like what we thought Terrelle Pryor would be, finding equal success throwing and running and leading a top 10 team to big win after big win.  With a matchup against Virginia Tech looming, a third straight win could power Miami into at least my top 5.  There’s also Cincinnati, who seems poised to prove that the Big East isn’t all bad.  After blowing out Rutgers, and embarrassing Southeast Missouri State, Cincinnati proved themselves with an impressive win in Corvallis, knocking the Beavers out of our ballot.  Questionably, Ohio State drops two spots after a shutout of Toledo. I guess USC losing to Washington makes that loss look a little worse, but I’ll give  the Buckeyes the benefit of the doubt.  They’re #8 on my ballot.

Back in the Saddle Again: Of our 5 newcomers to the ballot, two are no strangers to the NittanyWhiteOut top 25.  Florida State finds themselves back in the top 20 after drubbing BYU, and suddenly, that loss to Miami doesn’t look so bad, does it?  The way Miami’s shooting up the rankings, a tough loss to the Canes is nothing to be ashamed of.  Also, Oregon (somehow) finds themselves ranked in the the top 25.  I won’t air my grievances with some of Charlie and Kevin’s rankings here, but even in their win over Utah, Jeremiah Masoli completed just 4 of 16 passes. 4 of 16! However, we will welcome UCLA, Kansas, and Houston to our rankings. I’ve talked about Houston before, but UCLA looks like they’re on their way back to respectability, with a 3-0 record, featuring a win over a Tennessee team that gave Florida all they could handle last Saturday.  Kansas has played a non-conference schedule worse than ours, but they’ve looked solid in running up the score against over-matched teams. Good for them.

It’s All About the Washingtons, baby: I’m more than a little bit surprised that I was the only one of us who ranked Washington in my top 25 (at 22).  Yes, they were 0-12 last year.  But that shouldn’t have anything to do with how we rank them this year.  With a win over USC that is the year’s most impressive to date, and the only loss coming closely at the hands of an LSU team that we deem a top-10 team, how can we not include the Huskies as one of the top 25 teams in the country?  I’d argue that their 2-1 is a hell of a lot better than Oregon’s, Georgia’s, and probably both Oklahoma’s and Oklahoma State’s.  I’m not quite sure whether we’re supposed to rank by potential or by past results or by whatever we feel like, but no matter how you rank these teams to exclude Washington completely is a joke, and I’m honestly a little bit ashamed for us here.

Teams that were ranked by one or more of us, but didn’t make the ballot: Washington (Devon), Iowa (Devon and Charlie), Georgia Tech (Charlie and Kevin), Missouri (Kevin)

Releated Posts:

1. NittanyWhiteOut Week 1 Blogpoll Top 25
2. NittanyWhiteOut Week 4 Blogpoll Top 25
3. Mid-Majors crash Charlie’s Week 1 Blogpoll
4. Devons’ Week 1 Blogpoll Rankings
5. Devon’s Week 7 Blogpoll Rankings