Now in its fifth 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, and now appears on CBS Sportsline. It’s an effort to provide a more rigorous check on the mainstream polls that actually, like, count toward the mythical championship, and enthusiastically shines a light on its voters' biases. But mainly, it’s fun.

This week's ballot is brought to you by Alabama natives The Pierces, who celebrate their native state's return to the No. 1 slot and sum up the burgeoning theme at the top of the polls:

Nothing thrills us anymore
No one kills us anymore
Life is such a chore
When it's … Boring (when it's boring)

Sad but true: Until the now-unavoidable SEC Championship blockbuster between Alabama and Florida, this season is dangerously close to jumping the shark after the tumultuous championship intrigue of the last two years. It's the "Big Three" at the top until further notice, and it's becoming less and less likely that notice is ever coming.

• Neither Oregon nor Iowa takes the big, awkward tumble here that they did in the mainstream polls, which were apparently just looking for the right opportunity to cut the off-brand interlopers down to size and seized on bad losses to the brainiac contingent at Stanford and Northwestern, respectively, as sufficient justification to pull out the knives: Both the AP and Coaches polls docked Iowa seven spots for falling to the Wildcats at home, and dropped the Ducks seven and eight spots, respectively, for their flop in Palo Alto. The fact that Oregon not only fell behind USC on those ballots, but fell significantly behind just one week after reducing the Trojans to dust -- and will almost certainly remain behind if both teams win out -- is an instant discredit to the entire operation.

Both the Ducks and Hawkeyes were undervalued in those polls to begin with, and both deserve to remain in the top 10 based on a collection of wins as impressive as any team in the country, including the SEC frontrunners -- Oregon dealt USC its worst beating of the decade, Utah its only loss of the season and Cal a cold-water shower re: the Bears' second-class status in the conference; Iowa is still the only team with three wins over teams in this week's BCS top 25 (Arizona, Penn State, Wisconsin). USC is in the same broad category with quality wins over Ohio State, Oregon State, Notre Dame and Cal -- all but Oregon State on the road -- but hasn't done (and won't do) anything to overrule its loss in Eugene as far as the Trojans' position by Oregon is concerned.

• On the other end of the scheduling scale, the trio of Oklahoma State, Wisconsin and Penn State remain very unpersuasive despite their solid records. As best I can tell, those three teams' best wins are Georgia, Fresno State and Northwestern, respectively, and they're a combined 0-6 against teams ranked in the top 20, accounting for all their losses; actually, they're a big reason some of those teams are in the top 20 to begin with. The best you can say about the Cowboys, Badgers and Lions at this point is that they're not easily toppled by the rabble that makes up the overwhelming majority of their schedules.

But far and away the worst schedule of any outfit in the top 25 belongs to Utah: The Utes have faced two winning teams, Oregon and Air Force, and fell to the much better of the pair. Louisville may be even less valuable to the strength of the Utes' otherwise awful non-conference schedule than Michigan turned out to be last year.

As always, everything will be completely different next week; the full resumé chart is below.

+/–: Average margin of victory; SoS: Strength of schedule (calculated by Jeff Sagarin); Oppt %: Combined winning percentage all opponents. Teams in bold are ranked in this week's BCS top 25; italics notes teams from non-BCS conferences or BCS conference teams with losing records.