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goodnames679 Ballot for 2025 Week 4

Ballot Type: Human

Submitted: Sept. 14, 2025, 7:31 p.m.

Overall Rationale: As I tend to do around this time of the season, this week I am taking a large step towards removing predictions on how good a team should be. There is still a touch of predictive ranking in here, I don't fully phase it out until about week 6 or 7 when programs have a larger body of work to rank them on - but you'll notice significant drops for teams that have not faced stiff competition yet such as Penn State or Texas. You'll also notice a few significant jumps for those teams who have wins against strong teams (even if those wins may have happened in week 1) This does tend to leave certain teams in a weird state of limbo, where they're ranked differently than they would be if you were being fully predictive (looking for just the best teams in the country regardless of having good wins yet) but also differently than if you were going fully results based (because it would be kind of absurd to e.g. unrank Texas or have a top 5 Vanderbilt at this point in the season). Over the following 2 or 3 weeks this will settle out as more programs play high quality opponents in their conference schedules, making it easier to rank based fully on results.

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