Our first poll of the year is out (we just take a week longer than the Harris people (we also don't vote for Idaho!!!)). The full poll with comments and combined point total from me and Chad is available at http://mesolab.meas.ncsu.edu/~cringley/blog/cstop25blog.html

You can also compare our poll results to others in the BlogPoll world at http://mgoboard.com/blogpoll/voter-grid.php?css_url=http://mgoboard.com/blogpoll/CSS/mgoblog.css. I think so far the polls entered are all nuts. What's with the lack of respect for Nebraska? I know they aren't a National Champ contender, but they haven't lost a game and took care of things this week. UCLA has struggled more and Texas Tech has played weaker opponents. Yet many aren't even ranking them. And there's no way you can rank Minnesota that low, when they have a Heisman candidate running back (I still believe he's right up there... especially if they can win out), and had to travel on the road to play Penn State. They beat Purdue last week. Louisville has played no one and has lost a game.

And it's amazing to see the bias people can allow into their polls for their most/least favorite teams. Ours is from 100% pure observation.

Two notes: I considered putting VT above Texas. This week will be big for UT to prove something. They have to win decisively to end the curse. Second, we argued for greaterthan-equalto 28 months over Tennessee versus LSU position. The reasons go back to our core beliefs about college football. Chad believes head-to-head matchups should be the deciding tie-breaker, and I still believe other stuff can be more important. You'll probably see more about this in the upcoming weeks!

1	Southern Cal	25
2	Texas	24
3	Virginia Tech	23
4	Florida State	22
5	Georgia	21
6	Alabama	20
7	Ohio State	19
8	Wisconsin	18
9	Cal	17
10	Notre Dame	16
11	Miami (Florida)	15
12	Penn State	14
13	Tennessee	13
14	Louisiana State	12
15	Arizona State	11
16	UCLA	10
17	Florida	9
18	Texas Tech	8
19	Michigan State	7
20	Nebraska	6
21	Boston College	5
22	Michigan	4
23	Oregon	3
24	Minnesota	2
25	Auburn	1

Final consensus poll comes out Wednesday at http://mgoblog.blogspot.com/.