The best part of the college football polls every week is the discussion they bring. With that in mind, a rundown of the winners and losers from this week’s rankings.
College Football Rankings: The Winners And Losers Of The Week 12 Polls
Winners
Boise State is the big winner in this week’s polls. The Broncos were the only unbeaten team to move up and benefited from a close win by TCU, sliding up to third in both the AP and USA Today polls. This puts Boise State in pole position to claim the automatic BCS bid as the highest-ranking team from a non-automatic qualifier conference and play in the Rose Bowl come January. If they hold on to that spot, the Boise State athletic department should send some roses to San Diego State.
Stanford and Oklahoma State are also winners, moving up past idle teams by beating conference foes. It doesn’t do much but improve BCS positioning for each team, but they got to climb without other teams losing, which is rare.
And congratulations are due to Northwestern, which sneaks into the USA Today top 25 just in time for College GameDay to come to town for the Wildcats’ Wrigley Field game against Illinois.
Losers
For the second straight week, Utah leads this category. Losing to Notre Dame will do that. The Utes, who could have been the leading non-BCS conference team with a win over TCU two weeks ago, now find themselves barely clinging to their spots in the final five teams of both the USA Today and AP polls.
TCU is obviously smarting, too, moving from third to fourth in both polls and falling behind Boise State in a race for the Rose Bowl.
Michigan State takes a beating in both polls, falling behind Oklahoma State in the USA Today poll and behind Alabama in the AP Poll. That’s especially painful because it looks like the Big Ten championship will be decided by the final BCS standings.
Happily, the coaches are back to making very little sense this week. Wisconsin six spots ahead of the Michigan State team it lost to? Oklahoma two slots ahead of the Missouri team that upset it? Michigan still receiving votes? Yes, yes, and yes.
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