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mickeyquicknumbers Ballot for 2016 Week 2

Ballot Type: Human

Submitted: Sept. 6, 2016, 1:06 a.m.

Overall Rationale: USC dropped from my rankings, the loss to Alabama makes it self explanatory. Florida was on my rankings, but I dropped them because the offensive staleness against a very bad team makes me think they still have a ways to go before being of ranked quality. Expect my rankings to change rapidly until week 4 when my preseason rankings are fully filtered out and on-field play becomes the only factor. 

Rank Team Reason
1 Alabama Crimson Tide Just, lol
2 Clemson Tigers They survived with just barely enough working in their favor not to be dropped. It will be about 6 more weeks before we have a real bearing on how good this team is.
3 Michigan Wolverines Good teams make bad teams look bad. They played a bad team and made them look bad, ergo.
4 Florida State Seminoles FSU had a spectacular, horrifying, wonderful, terrible win Monday night. Some very real negatives (awful offensive line) makes me think this isn't their year, but they beat a pretty good Ole Miss team and they apparently have a QB, so here they stay for now.
5 Washington Huskies Given the slaughter of preseason expectations in week one, Washington deserves kudos for beating up on a bad P5 team.
6 Louisville Cardinals Even against cupcakes, you want to see offensive functionality so that you know it exists even if in a vacuum (see e.g. Florida). Louisville has big tests coming but they look ready for them.
7 Ohio State Buckeyes Ohio State moves up big this week in my poll because they were one of 9 teams that looked like they knew how to play good football. Oklahoma just got very interesting.
8 Georgia Bulldogs Georgia is alive! Eason looked like a guy who can be a good immediate starter, Chubb is now running at full mast, and the defense looked quite sharp.
9 Houston Cougars Houston is easily one of the three best coached teams in the country - they have electricity everywhere on offense, and a DT that could start for almost every team in the nation as a true freshman. Please squeeze to make room for me on this bandwagon.
10 Oklahoma State Cowboys Did exactly what I expected them to do, and that's frankly better than most P5 teams in week 1.
11 Wisconsin Badgers Excellent win. there are still plenty of questions for this team, but the defensive stoutness continues from Aranda to Wilcox, and that's good news.
12 Texas A&M Aggies Praise be to offensive coherence! Knight actually didn't look all that good, but I want to believe this unit is going to work more functionally overall - and the defense is finally starting to reflect on its amazing DC.
13 Texas Longhorns Sure why not? Texas might actually have a quarterback they can trust at last. All the sudden teams like Cal, ISU, and Kansas State don't feel like daunting trials. 
14 Notre Dame Fighting Irish There's no shame in losing on the road to what turned out to be a quite good texas team. Kizer looked great, the defense looked.... eh, Kizer is good enough that they'll still win plenty of games. 
15 Oklahoma Sooners I think every question we had about Oklahoma coming into this season:- can the offensive line survive the turnover?- can the defense survive the loss of so many playmakers?- can the receivers step up to fill in the holes from graduation/draft departures?All looked like a resounding "no" this week.
16 LSU Tigers Poor fellas. This isn't the end of the world, and the tigers will still probably win 8 or 9 regular season games. But.... yikes.
17 UCLA Bruins The offensive line questions I had for the bruins turned out to be very real. If Rosen could have not stunk up the first half I still believe UCLA was very much good enough to win. c'est la vie.
18 North Carolina Tar Heels They played commendably against an elite secondary and a team very capable of gobbling up the TOP, so I'm not dropping them all the way off. Trubisky definitely has work to do against stout defenses though.
19 TCU Horned Frogs I had TCU ranked 7th preseason based largely off of an expectation that their defense would be radically improved from 2015. Instead we get 7.1 yards per play allowed by an FCS school.
20 Ole Miss Rebels Chad Kelly needs to average fewer than 4 turnovers a game from hereon out, the but the defensive line is awesome and the wide receivers are great - two very strong components that will win Ole Miss plenty of their remaining games.
21 Pittsburgh Panthers Did exactly what I expected them to do. Would have liked to see more offensive firepower, but the defense looks great and that is what keeps them here.
22 USF Bulls Did exactly what I expected them to against a weak Villanova.
23 Michigan State Spartans This was not pretty football, against a very bad opponent.
24 Stanford Cardinal Outgained by 63 yards by a KSU team I expect to win 4 or 5 games. Eesh. McCaffrey looked troublingly overburdened.
25 Oregon Ducks This defense could be horrendously bad. Prukop looked good against a soft pillow defense, so Oregon fans have to be somewhat happy about that.

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