College Football Rankings: With Loss To South Carolina, Alabama Won’t Be No. 1 Much Longer

Despite a season’s worth of doubt and criticism, after six weeks of the college football season LSU remains unbeaten. So is this the week the Tigers make a big leap forward in the college football polls?

The No. 12 Tigers’ win over Florida could spark a lot of movement in the AP and coaches polls, which will come out early Sunday afternoon. In addition to LSU’s signature win of its season, a few other unbeaten teams lost on Saturday:

With South Carolina upsetting No. 1 Alabama, we’ll surely have a new No. 1 team in both the AP and Coaches Poll when the new college football rankings are released on Sunday. But we’ll also have a new No. 1 in the College Football BlogPoll on Wednesday ... and the results could be quite different than in the other two polls.

Consider: In this past week’s BlogPoll, Oregon got two first-place votes, Ohio State got one, and Boise State got none. That’s nearly opposite of the AP poll last week, when the Ducks got no first place votes and Boise and the Buckeyes did.

With South Carolina knocking off No.1 Alabama on Saturday afternoon, the college football polls are sure to get a shakeup across the board when they’re released on Sunday.

Alabama had owned the No. 1 spot in the college football rankings since the end of last season, when it beat Texas in the BCS title game.

ESPN is beginning to leverage its television rights to the BCS.

The network will release the BCS standings on a new weekly 75-minute “BCS Countdown” show starting October 17.

A comparison study of the Week 6 BlogPoll college football rankings and those of the Associated Press Poll shows that there’s at least some conventional wisdom at work this early in the season:

Top five: Nearly identical. Oregon hops Ohio State in the BlogPoll, but beyond that, it appears bloggers and mainstream media types are in close to perfect agreement regarding the country’s best teams.

During Appalachian State’s bye week, they enjoyed some time off, rested sore muscles and took time to watch extra game film. Oh, and they also become the No. 1 team in the country. Following Villanova’s 31-24 loss at William & Mary -- dropping their record to 3-2 overall -- the voters awarded Appalachian State and their perfect 4-0 mark, giving them the No. 1 spot in The Sports Network FCS Top-25 Poll.

The Mountaineers earned 101 of a possible 143 first-place votes.

The full Week 6 AP Poll:

The full Week 6 USA Today Coaches Poll:

The Week 6 USA Today Coaches Poll is the far less sane part of the the college football rankings for the Football Bowl Subdivision this week.

Oregon jumps to third, nudging Boise State out of the way, as in the Week 6 AP Poll, but LSU moves up from 10th to ninth despitegetting one of the season’s luckiest wins against Tennessee.

The best of the rest in this week’s college football rankings includes Boise State and TCU, but neither school is where it would like to be.

The Broncos and Horned Frogs are just two of five non-BCS conference teams in the Week 6 AP Poll, but they’ve fallen behind three teams in the race to the BCS Championship Game, and may end up in the same position as previous years: fighting for the lone automatic BCS berth to a non-title game.

The college football rankings are not being kind to the Big East.

The Week 6 AP Poll makes this the second straight week the Big East hasn’t had a team ranked in the AP Top 25.

The Week 6 AP Poll begins today’s reveal of the college football polls for the Football Bowl Subdivision this week, and it gives Oregon a boost for beating down Stanford that might have some BCS Championship ramifications.

Oregon moves up to third, leaping Boise State. Elsewhere, LSU falls to 12th despite a win and Texas and USC fall out of the poll completely.