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T-Thugs Ballot for 2018 Week 2

Ballot Type: Human

Submitted: Sept. 5, 2018, 9:52 a.m.

Overall Rationale: I generally base my ballot on a "what have you done so far this year" mentality. For that reason, my poll changes drastically throughout the first few weeks of the season. Teams that win tough games are bumped to the top of my list over teams that played cupcakes. Likewise, however, I also completely re-start my ballot each week, so if a team is currently in my top 10 and wins, that doesn't necessarily mean I will keep them in my top ten if other teams begin to have more impressive resumes. For that reason, I am often on the most controversial ballot list early on, but my rankings start to fit more in line with everyone else as the season continues and we get a larger sample size of games. 

Rank Team Reason
1 Alabama Crimson Tide Reigning national champs laid a beating on Louisville. 
2 LSU Tigers LSU looked dominant in a win over what everyone expected to be a very good Miami team. We'll see if that Miami team continues to look good, but that seemed to be a very impressive win. 
3 Notre Dame Fighting Irish Won a tough game at home against Michigan and their offense seemed to go into conservative, "don't blow it" mode once they were up 21-3. They seemed to move the ball well against a tough Michigan defense.
4 Auburn Tigers Defeated pre-season Pac12 favorites Washington in a tough game. 
5 Virginia Tech Hokies Went on the road to a tough environment at Florida State and completely dominated the game. Florida State did not look very good, so maybe this won't count as an impressive win later, but for now it's good enough to put VT right here.
6 West Virginia Mountaineers Stomped Tennessee. Will Grier had an impressive start to the season and his Heisman campaign. 
7 Maryland Terrapins Another year of knocking off Texas in the first week. It's hard to know what we're getting with Texas, so maybe this win won't be one of the nation's best for long, but it is this week.
8 Northwestern Wildcats Defeated Purdue on the road. Purdue isn't great, but they are a power 5 team and they had some high hopes this year after finishing 7-6 last season and defeating Arizona in a bowl game. 
9 Cincinnati Bearcats Cincinnati wins on the road at UCLA to open the season. Spoiled Chip Kelly's debut. 
10 BYU Cougars BYU opened their season with a win on the road over Arizona.
11 Ohio State Buckeyes They played a pretty bad Oregon State team, but they completely dominated them and Oregon state is a Pac12 team. I generally count p5 wins as better than non-p5 wins to start the year.
12 California Golden Bears Defeated ACC opponent North Carolina. NC stinks but I'm counting p5 wins as better than non-p5 wins as a baseline to start the year. 
13 Stanford Cardinal Stanford won pretty handily against a San Diego State team that went 10-3 last season with solid wins over Stanford and Arizona State. SDSU may not have the same caliber team this year but there isn't much to work with so far.
14 Duke Blue Devils Duke handily beat an Army team that went 10-3 last season.
15 Oklahoma Sooners Now we move into the land of good teams that pounded on cupcakes. Oklahoma dominated FAU. 
16 Hawai'i Rainbow Warriors Sitting at 2-0 after a nice win over Navy. Their offense could be legit. Of course, they also may have played 2 terrible teams. Colorado State looks like one of the worst teams in college football. 
17 Georgia Bulldogs Beat the hell out of some nobodies.
18 Clemson Tigers Also beat the hell out of a bad team.
19 Mississippi State Bulldogs Crushed Stephen F Austin.
20 USC Trojans Soundly beat UNLV.
21 UCF Knights Crushed Uconn.
22 TCU Horned Frogs Dominated Southern. 
23 Wisconsin Badgers Beat western Kentucky. 
24 Boise State Broncos
25 Oregon Ducks

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