String of Upsets Shake Up the Latest AP Poll

After this past weekend’s action, the top three teams in the AP Poll stayed exactly the same. No. 1 Florida, No. 2 Texas and No. 3 Alabama kept put. After that...you might have to search to find teams after the fallout from all of the upsets.

The biggest movers?

After California was routed 42-3 by unranked Oregon, the Bears fell 18 spots from No. 6 to No. 24.

After losing to South Carolina on Thursday, Ole Miss plummeted 17 spots from No. 4 to No. 21.

The Penn Stare Nittany Lions fell 10 spots to No. 15 after losing to Iowa.

The Miami-Virginia Tech game worked both ways. Virginia Tech’s 31-7 victory over Miami moved the Hokies up five spots to No. 6 while the Hurricanes dropped from 9th to 17th.

TCU is up four spots to No. 11 after their win over Clemson.

Cincinnati moved up to the highest spot in school history, No. 10, after their win over Fresno State.

The massive shake-up in the past few weeks has begged the question...are these all really big upsets or are preseason polls just one giant waste of time? Oklahoma blog Crimson and Cream Machine thinks the BCS rankings, which aren’t released until the middle of the season, are a much smarter approach.

The preseason rankings are a joke, they rate some teams way too high, and others way too low, and if certain teams are starting closer to the finish line than others, that just seems like an unfair advantage. Plus, the giants that fell in week four got penalized harshly for their losses.

...I think that after teams have played about 5 to 6 games (around Week 6), you should have enough information to rank the teams in a relatively fair fashion. These massive fluctuations show that the pollsters have no idea how to properly rank teams, and they don’t have a clue how to penalize teams for losses, or reward teams for victories.