If I may digress for a moment here… Oregon State and TCU are both 5-5, which means either some of you have interesting criteria for the top teams in the country, or you’re not paying attention to your ballots before you post them.  Try a little harder, aight?

Okay, back to our regular programming.

We had 261 folks cast votes, which means we’re back to not having any unanimous teams.  That’s actually more people than we had vote the previous week, which is a nice trend compared to years past.  What did go down this week was the average number of teams on a ballot, to 7.4.  That does makes some sense, given the lateness of the season.

Here’s what the conference breakdown looks like:

And here’s how long we took casting ballots.

It’s taking more of us less time — not really a surprise.  The “where we’re from” data remains unchanged, with five-eighths of us hailing from Georgia.

For comparison’s sake, as usual, here’s what the CFP selection committee came up with this week:

A few thoughts:

• Our top four match the selection committee’s — again, with a lot less time and expense involved.
• The top tier (teams appearing on a minimum of 90% of all ballots) remains unchanged, but the Dawgs are creeping up.
• Interesting how we’ve let Alabama slide more than the selection committee has.  We’re also a lot more bullish on Oklahoma than they are.
• Utah was a big mover this week, up three spots and showing up on almost half our ballots.  Is it just a case of more awareness on our part, or genuine improvement from last week?
• Kind of interesting to see that if you’re a playoff person of either the four- or eight-team variety, the poll results this week fit neatly into construction of either sized field.