Back to poll results >>

Muffinnnnnnn Ballot for 2025 Week 8

Ballot Type: Human

Submitted: Oct. 14, 2025, 4:08 a.m.

Overall Rationale: Wins and losses matter most. If you have the same or better record as another team and you beat them head-to-head, you must be ahead of that team. What a shakeup in multiple areas of the rankings this week. I had 4 teams drop out of my top 25, those being North Texas, Old Dominion, Michigan, and Oklahoma. I have a feeling that choosing to drop out Oklahoma will be controversial, but here's my question: what have they actually done this year? They beat a Michigan team much less convincingly than USC did, they needed extreme ref help to avoid losing to Auburn, and then got completely dominated by a not very good Texas team. When you look over their whole season, I'm not so sure this is even a top 25 team. If you want to rank them in the 20-25 range, that's fine. I don't feel as strongly about that as I do LSU being the biggest fraud in the rankings who is not a top 25 team whatsoever. The other three teams who dropped out all took massive lopsided losses and as such, fell out of the top 25. Teams 22-25 were the four newcomers this week, in Notre Dame, Illinois, USC, and Nebraska. If you had me rank #26, it would definitely be Cincy, but there just wasn't room this time. Indiana's double-digit road win over Oregon propelled them to the #1 spot in the country. I debated putting Oregon lower than #6, but for now I'm keeping them here. However, another loss will likely have a stronger than usual impact on them, as I'm not punishing them much for the Indiana loss now. I almost dropped Ole Miss into the land of 1-loss teams below them for their massive struggle vs Washington State and overall no impressive wins, but for now I'll keep them in the top 10. Games that have massive refball that significantly alter the game enough to put the result in question have an impact in these rankings as well. Some examples include Oklahoma over Auburn and Georgia Tech over Wake Forest. In these cases, I do a soft punishment for each. It's not the same as adding a loss to their résumé, but it pushes those teams in that direction. I'm guessing Louisville will continue to be one of my most unusual, and I'll defend it once again in the reddit comment. Louisville's wins over Pitt and James Madison and only loss being in OT to Virginia makes me still believe what I believed in the preseason: Louisville is a genuinely good team. Be sure to let me know how stupid I am!

Back to poll results >>