Now in its fourth year, the Blog Poll is a weekly effort of dozens of college football-centric Web sites representing a wide array of schools under the oversight of founder/manager/guru Brian Cook at MGoBlog. It’s an effort to provide a more rigorous check on the mainstream polls that actually, like, count toward the mythical championship, and all biases are in the open. But mainly, it’s fun.

This week’s stridently merit-based ballot is brought to you by Jim Croce, who reminds readers that,

. . . after all, it's what we've done that makes us what we are.

He also reminds them to calm down if they're struggling to make sense of the apparently random offering to the right. This always creates problems at the beginning of the year, but I have two steadfast rules when it comes to in-season polls: 1. They must be internally consistent, with a consistent methodology throughout the season, and 2. They must be ranked strictly according to results. Not expected results, or any conjecture of what might happen on a neutral field or anything in that vein. It's what you've done that makes you what you are; consistent with that, this initial ballot only takes into account the performance in week one alone, and judges the value of each win based on the margin and, more importantly, on the preseason expectations of the conquered.

And if you leave a comment that says, "OMG u think La Tech is better than LSU lol" I swear I will find your house and strangle you. Louisiana Tech had a better win (over '07 SEC bowl team Mississippi State) than LSU (over I-AA Appalachian State) in the first week. And the Tigers are an exception because the Mountaineers' are an exceptional I-AA outfit -- no one else who beat up on some hapless lower-division punching bag was even considered. That goes for Ohio State, Oklahoma, Georgia and everybody else. You get in when you start winning real games. Be patient, and the results will shake out soon enough.

Here we essentially have four tiers of teams, based on who they beat Saturday (or, in a couple cases, Thursday):

• Teams 1-5: Alabama, Missouri, UCLA and East Carolina all beat presumably strong BCS conference teams that appeared in almost everybody's top 20 coming into the year; the Tide was clearly the most impressive all the way around over Clemson, a near-unanimous top ten pick, and therefore are far and away the number one team based on that performance. USC is the exception in this group: nobody expected Virginia to be good, but the Cavs were a nine-win team last year, and were completely destroyed to an extent that rivals Missouri's and UCLA's much closer wins over (we assume) better teams.

• Teams 6-10: All six teams in this group -- Utah, Fresno State, Cal, Bowling Green and Stanford -- beat respectable-to-good BCS conference teams with some moderate ambition. Other than Cal, they were also all underdogs, and in the case of the Falcons and Cardinal, may have already hit the high point of their season.

• Teams 11-16: This group -- South Carolina, Kentucky, Oregon, Oklahoma State, Arkansas State and Louisiana Tech -- beat BCS conference teams with lesser ambitions, and except for Oregon, were not all that impressive in the process. The Ducks are also the only team in this category I expect to hang around when the games get tougher: if any group that can expect a fleeting stay, it's this one: wins over N.C. State, Louisville, Washington, Mississippi State, Texas A&M et al will not hold enough value to keep them afloat for very long. For now, though, they're being compared to teams that feasted outright on cupcakes, so they get the benefit for tackling an opener with a pulse.

• Teams 18-23: All six teams here -- Texas, TCU, Vanderbilt, Florida, LSU, Ole Miss and Nebraska -- beat up on a moderately respectable, very likely bowl-bound mid-major team that conceivably could have made an upset bid (except in Vandy's case, where losing to Miami of Ohio would not have been much of a surprise to anyone). All of them took care of business comfortably.

Wake Forest and Northwestern bring up the rear because, while there may not be much virtue in hammering Baylor and Syracuse, respectively, at least the Deacons and Wildcats did, in fact, hammer those sorry offerings. And you try finding someone else not ranked above them that turned in better wins than Baylor and Syracuse.

As always, flexibility rules: I'll start the process over from scratch again next week, when everything will be completely different.

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Photo of Lorenzo Washington via Getty Images.