Back to poll results >>

Maladroit44 Ballot for 2026 Week 6

Ballot Type: Human

Submitted: Oct. 6, 2026, 9 a.m.

Overall Rationale: I take back everything bad I've ever said about Mizzou, they've done the Lord's work this week.

Rank Team Reason
1 Georgia Bulldogs We're about to learn a lot more about both this team and Alabama; I'm sticking to my guns on UGA being #1 heading into that game. Surely they find a way past DeBoer this time, right?
2 Indiana Hoosiers A lot of how you feel about this team depends on how you feel about Northwestern, and vice versa. I'm growing more confident that NW is actually just pretty damn good, and Indiana is still great. A trip to Nebraska this week, followed by a home date with Ohio State the week after, will tell us a whole lot more about the Hoosiers, though.
3 Miami Hurricanes This week provided one of the biggest data points we'll have on Miami until they go to Notre Dame in November...and it was a 28-point win against a lifeless Clemson. I don't love having them this high but nobody else looks good enough for #3, so...
4 Ohio State Buckeyes The Iowa win is probably a little less impressive than it looks, considering PGWE says the Hawkeyes should've lost last week to a deeply unfortunate Michigan team. Still, it's a 17-point blowout on the road against a previously-undefeated opponent; hard not to see some value in that.
5 Utah Utes DNP this week, but of course, résumés continue to evolve nonetheless. Mainly, the somewhat competitive (but still ultimately safe) win at ISU last week immediately looks a bit more impressive after the Cyclones' victory over WVU this week.
6 Notre Dame Fighting Irish Like Miami, the Irish won't give us a lot of data points until their big games (though at least they also have @ BYU coming up, a couple weeks sooner than their showdown with the Canes). Unlike Miami, they found themselves struggling with a mediocre ACC team this week—in the rain, admittedly—which tanks confidence in them a bit when they haven't had a chance to prove much yet.
7 Alabama Crimson Tide DeBoer's Tide have been really tough to rank, at least if you don't let the name on the jersey convince you they're a top-ten team in perpetuity. Every year it seems like their peak is an utterly unstoppable force, but it's rare they ever hit that high for a full 60 minutes. This week was about as locked-in as they've been all year...but they also went four-and-out, then two-and-fumble, then four-and-out during the second quarter. Can't have that kinda lapse against a team like Georgia next week.
8 Texas Longhorns DNP this week. The Ohio State win looks better, the Tennessee win maybe looks a little worse (though I already didn't make much of it). It's a wash, more or less.
9 BYU Cougars I said last week I was keeping an eye out for moments of inconsistency from BYU, and they sure showed this week, dropping the Cougars a tier. Asterisk that their star RB left the game in the first quarter with an injury, and their defense showed up to stifle TCU on the road, but it's rarely a great sign when your quarterback has more yards rushing than passing. Bear Bachmeier is, uh, probably off the Heisman watchlist now.
10 Northwestern Wildcats All of a sudden, Northwestern's got a better résumé than practically any other non-undefeated. Dominant, controlling blowout wins over Colorado and Penn State, plus a highly competitive, questionably-officiated road loss to the defending national champs? Their worst performance is a somewhat competitive win over South Dakota State, but even there, it's hard to fault them much for a win over what'll surely be the new FCS #1 this week. I'm all the way in on this team; gimme David Braun in the playoff.
11 Duke Blue Devils DNP this week, and only holds steady despite a couple teams directly ahead of them falling. That'll happen when your best win bewilderingly loses at home to Purdue, but dropping or unranking Duke over it seems like a bit of an overreaction to me. The Blue Devils shouldn't be treated as a surprise upstart—they're a reliably good team that should be here until proven otherwise, firmly.
12 Oklahoma State Cowboys DNP this week. Both the Pokes and Ducks jump a good bit this week, mainly as a consequence of (a) the second-tier SEC collective settling a little lower in the rankings and (b) head-to-head putting Oregon over Boise State. As someone who doesn't often believe in my team much, I do believe in what I've seen of them lately, but I'd be lying if I said I was confident heading into a home matchup against an unimpressive UCF. It's our game to lose, so obviously we're going to lose it.
13 Oregon Ducks DNP this week. I'm skeptical that USC was a real test, and I'm equally skeptical that a home date with UCLA this week will be one; vs Nebraska and especially vs Northwestern a couple weeks later will be more telling, but we won't really know for sure what the Ducks are until their trip to Columbus in early November. We're all just waiting for Week 10 to know anything, aren't we?
14 Boise State Broncos Between Northwestern and Boise State, I'm beginning to wonder if I need to rethink the implications of a close or close-ish FCS win, at least against a good team (in these cases, South Dakota State and South Dakota, respectively). Maybe the gap between divisions has narrowed enough that we should expect to see the FCS's best giving top-25 FBS teams a real fight, because both NW and BSU have definitely looked deserving of a ranking outside those games.
15 Missouri Tigers Well, shit. My feelings about the whole Mizzou–Florida–Ole Miss–LSU chain are obviously complicated, but they've grown even more complicated because of how the supporting cast performed this week: terribly, to say the least. LSU's big win over Clemson looks irrelevant, Ole Miss's over Louisville looks shockingly unimpressive, and Mizzou's loss to Mississippi State immediately got worse even as they obliterated the Gators. For now, I'm just throwing them all in the mid-to-low 10s and waiting to see if any of them prove it against one of the SEC's real, undeniable elites.
16 Florida Gators See above. Of course, part of the takeaway with these results is simply that most of these teams have seen substantial coaching and roster turnover lately, so naturally they're going to be inconsistent.
17 Ole Miss Rebels See above. Still, though, how do you make sense of a team going from a spectacular win over one opponent in its approximate bracket to a massive blowout loss to another? Let alone the team that handed out *that* blowout then doing exactly the same thing a week later?
18 LSU Tigers ...see above. I really don't know, and I'm aware ranking them all in order like this is a bit of a copout, but I'd be lying if I pretended to have a better idea of what these teams are after 4-5 games apiece. Nobody else they've beaten is ranked in my poll, and I'm unsure where to rank any of them, which means I'm also unsure of where to rank them for their wins over each other. Head-to-head it is, at least for the time being.
19 Iowa Hawkeyes Iowa is still Iowa, to the surprise of nobody. I mentioned above that the stats suggest they were very lucky to pull off a win at Michigan, and that factors into this ranking...but so does the fact that Michigan is just not a good win. The Hawkeyes haven't beaten a ranked team, and that might remain true for the rest of the season even if they go 10-2 or 11-1. Surely they can't get a playoff spot just for that, right...?
20 Wake Forest Demon Deacons On the one hand, Wake Forest's best win got substantially worse this week, as Louisville turned around and dropped to 2-3 against NC State. On the other hand, the Deacons' only loss to Miami is increasingly "good" (insofar as a loss can be), their close win over Purdue looks a little less embarrassing, and most importantly, they dismantled Stanford 57-3 behind a stellar day from Gio Lopez (265 passing yards and 2 passing TDs, 88 rushing yards and 3 rushing TDs). I'm still in on them.
21 Texas Tech Red Raiders Nothing Texas Tech has shown so far gives me the utmost confidence. Sure, they're undefeated and they have a couple maybe-solid wins, but it's hard to look at a team trailing Colorado 7-3 at halftime and respond with anything more than tepid praise for their eventual 29-7 victory. I don't know how anyone still has them in the top ten; they never belonged there to begin with, and they haven't proven otherwise.
22 Pittsburgh Panthers The winner of the unranked, undefeated ACC jamboree was always going to earn a spot, but Pitt's appearance here also has to do with UCF looking like a marginally more impressive win after the Knights almost took down Houston. (They didn't...but they could've!) I'm skeptical of the Panthers for a number of reasons, but they deserve the benefit of the doubt until they probably lose by 20+ at Miami in a few weeks.
23 Tennessee Volunteers As much as what I see of my first team (Oklahoma State) convinces me they're playing well, what I see of my second team (Tennessee)...uh, does not. I've been beating the drum that the Vols were never gonna get far without an answer at QB, and while George MacIntyre rescued them this week after Faizon Brandon's benching, I need a lot more than a second-half comeback against 3-2 Auburn to believe that issue is resolved.
24 Arizona Wildcats One big trend with CFB polling recently has been that some ACC/B12 teams (and occasionally even B1G teams!) simply get overlooked. Logically, there's no reason an Arizona team coming off a 9-4 season and a #17 finish shouldn't be in the top 25 conversation for a 4-1 start, with a loss to top-ten BYU and a crushing win this week over previously-undefeated Cincinnati. So, uh...where are they? I'm convinced a lot of people just haven't really thought about the Wildcats whatsoever; it's hard to explain why teams like Wisconsin and Kentucky, for example, get so much more love.
25 North Dakota State Bison NDSU bubbled up to the outskirts of my ballot last week, and this week they climb a spot to finally make it in. I'm far from certain whether the Bison are merely good or top-25 good, and this week's trip to UNLV (which just took down Cal) should tell us a bit, but the game to wait on is really NDSU @ UNM two weeks later.

Back to poll results >>