Rank	Team	Delta
1	Alabama	2
2	TCU
3	Cincinnati	3
4	Texas
5	Boise State
6	Florida	5
7	Oregon
8	Ohio State
9	Georgia Tech
10	Iowa
11	Penn State
12	Pittsburgh
13	Stanford
14	Virginia Tech
15	Miami (Florida)
16	Brigham Young
17	Northwestern	1
18	Oregon State	1
19	Nebraska	3
20	LSU	1
21	West Virginia	3
22	Arizona
23	Clemson	3
24	Central Michigan	1
25	Wisconsin
Last week’s ballot

Dropped Out: Southern Cal (#19), California (#23).

Well, the regular season is now completely behind us (fine, there’s still Army-Navy, but as far as meaningful regular season games go, we’re through), and it’s been a pretty entertaining season.  The one thing we were lacking, though, was the big upset.  Florida, Texas, and Alabama were among the top teams in the country at the start of the season, and now two of those teams will be playing in the championship game while the third team is still in the Sugar Bowl.  Sure, you had Purdue taking down Ohio State, Washington beating USC, and BYU shocking Oklahoma, but none of those games occurred late enough in the year–or to a legitimate enough contender–to really count as memorable.  Where was the Ole Miss over Florida, the Pitt surprising West Virginia, the Iowa shocking Penn State to send shockwaves through the NCAA?  This was a good year for college football, but frankly, it just wasn’t that fun.  There were few, if any, memorable games, and even the Alabama-Florida matchup didn’t come close to living up to the hype.  I bet Alabama will bury Texas, too, capping off an entirely forgettable season of college football.  Think about this for a sec: if it wasn’t for a generous replay review, the lasting memory of the 2009 College Football season would’ve been Colt McCoy nonchalantly throwing away his national championship chance along with the ball as the seconds ticked off the clock in the Big XII Championship Game.

Seeing as very little actually happened last week (you can see that 15 of the 25 teams in my ballot are in the exact same spot as they were a week ago), I think it would be interesting to revisit some of my preseason predictions.  I had Texas at 1 and Alabama at 14 (though I did jump the Tide up to #5 after the first week).  I swung and missed with USC and Oklahoma at #3 and #4 (but so did most of the country), but I’m very proud of ranking Oregon and Boise State at #6 and #8 in the preseason, off by just a couple of spots from their end of year slots.  Same goes for Ohio State, who I had at 7 over the summer.  I’ll also take credit for predicting big seasons out of Oregon State (19) and TCU (17), though I certainly couldn’t have expected this much success out of the Horned Frogs.  And I was selling early on everyone else’s darling Hokies, ranking them at #15 in the preseason.

Yet, there are just as many epic failures on my part, starting with the most obvious one: Illinois at 20.  Yes, I’m well aware that the Illini went 3-9.  So much for fortune favoring the bold.  I ranked Rutgers at 18, and they finished 3-4 in the Big East, losing to Syracuse (shut up, I know Northwestern did too).  I ranked 7-5 Georgia at #21, but that was lower than the majority of voters, so I won’t kill myself over that one.  But I definitely went out on a limb with Notre Dame at #13, and for that I should be ashamed.