This week, my rankings are starting to settle in a little bit. I've included information on movement within the rankings for this week, to give you some idea of what changed from last week. As is often the case during the season, the numbers at the top changed a lot less than the numbers at the bottom.

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Wow, so another weird week of football rankings. I think this week we can really see the difference between ranking and watching college football.

SEC? SEC!

My computer obviously did not have to sit through South Carolina's collapse against Auburn or Florida's beating at the hands of Alabama. While I realize that, especially in Florida's case, getting walloped by a good team is not necessarily a mark of shame (especially in my ranking system), South Carolina and Florida looked bad, like-out-of-the-Top-25 bad. As you can see below, this wasn't the case and my computer ranked both teams in highly (South Carolina at #9 was especially surprising).

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In my ongoing attempt to get the "Pilsch Index" added to the BCS statistical calculations, I am once again spending Sunday mornings arguing with my computer's BCS ranking program. Generally, my program is incapable of producing any coherent results during the first three weeks of the season (for instance, it had FIU as the #5 team in the nation last week). Unlike all of the actual BCS computers (and the BCS human polls, for that matter), my computer only uses on-field data to determine rankings. The AP Poll, USA Today Coaches Poll, and the BCS computers all use preseason rankings (in some fashion) as initial seeds to their ranking systems. In the case of the AP and USA Today polls, this seeding takes the form of the very scientific formula of "hype + historic reputation + rumor mill," all very useful factors in any mathematical calculation.

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