The HLS Totally Non-Homer Top 25 College Football Poll – Preseason Edition

We’re extraordinarily delighted to present our newest irregularly-regular feature to the masses:  The Her Loyal Sons Totally Non-Homer Top 25 College Football Poll.

We decided that our readers crave a little more consistency than what we usually serve up.  Sure, we consistently knock it out of the park with witty analysis and thoughtful commentary, but what the reader wants, the reader gets!  And the reader clearly wanted another Top 25 Poll!

How this will/should work:  Over the course of the remainder of this dreadful off-season, we will reveal a new team that holds ranking within our Top 25 Preseason Poll on a somewhat every-couple-of-dayish schedule, working our way to the eventual #1 spot.  The ballots have already been cast by the founding members of HLS, each using their own special methodology because, let’s face it, most of the major polls are completely ambiguous as to what the “Top 25″ really means.  We’re fairly certain that a particular AJC reporter picks based on uniform color, and a certain SEC coach picks based on golf handicap.

Our Methodologies:

• domer.mq – Carefully paged through a dozen pre-season college football magazines and tried to figure out, for this pre-season poll, anyway, which teams would most likely be playing the best football by the 5th or 6th week of the season, barring injury.  Would also like to know a good way to clean newsprint stains off khakis.
• The Biscuit – Developed “The Biscuit Formula,” encompassing such important factors as “Objective Biscuit Rating,” “Media’s Stupid Opinion,” How Much Can It Help ND?.” “Level of Hate,” and “Hotness of Cheerleaders.”  He threw it all into a Mac IIe, and got his ballot.
• Bad Kermit – Thought about each team, thought about how much he hates each team, ranked them, and then multiplied by -1.
• ChisND – Took a random poll he’d seen somewhere and saved in his del.icio.us bookmarks, threw out the French judge’s score, shook a Wii nunchuck at it, and sent in the results.

As you can see, our methodologies combine to rival those of the most sophisticated BCS components.

Some Observations on the first-ever HLSTNHT25CFP-PE:

• Unlike the rest of the world, we did not have a consensus #1.
• The average difference between the highest and lowest ranking of each team that made the HLSTNHT25CFP-PE is 7.25.
• The smallest difference between the highest and lowest ranking is 1.
• The largest difference between the highest and lowest ranking is 20.
• Nobody voted for Hawaii.
• There’s an awful lot of agreement in the head and tail of the poll, but the guts are as scrambled as mine after too much Persian food.
• Michigan still sucks.

Once the season starts, we’ll be updating the poll on a weekly basis, zeroing in on the best team in the land and what exactly that actually means.

Coming right up, the “Also Receiving Votes” bit of our poll, so that a handful of teams may know how close they came to glory while ultimately falling shorter than Gary Coleman.

They really will just let anyone have a pole these days.