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. 

Functional byes and actual byes throughout the top 10 last weekend means static in the upper reaches, and nefarious scheming for the sake of keeping things interesting. With three wins over ranked teams and seven over opponents currently sporting a winning record, Alabama remains the clear-cut No. 1, albeit not by a wide margin. I was tempted to move TCU into the No. 2 slot this week, though, just to shake things up a little, and because the Frogs have made a pretty good case for themselves -- about as good as Texas and Florida, anyway, which have one win apiece over a ranked team (TCU has three) and even nearly identical strengths of schedule according to Jeff Sagarin (see resumé chart below the jump). It would be a bold, provocative and largely defensible move.

It would also be fairly arbitrary. Two of TCU's three wins over ranked teams are against conference-mates BYU and Utah, which have won the games they should win against the lesser reaches of the MWC and not much else outside of getting their heads handed to them by the Frogs; beating he Cougars and Utes certainly doesn't seem much more valuable than Texas' second and third-best wins behind Oklahoma State (Texas Tech and Missouri, respectively) or even Florida's wins over Arkansas and Kentucky with both teams moving to 7-4 last week. With awful New Mexico destined to drag down the strength of schedule in this weekend's finale, the Frogs won't be leaping anyone barring an extreme calamity in front of them.

Going Coastal. The ACC and Pac-10 account for 11 of this week's top 25, as many as the other four "Big Six" conferences combined, and hold down the second half of the poll with gusto, represented in nine of the bottom dozen slots. That's what you get when you have a solid cluster of similar teams that all play one another and no truly dominating frontrunners like the teams out in front of the SEC, Big 12 and Big East. Of course, you have no powerhouse poster child to wave the league's championship flag, either, but those are the sacrifices one must make for depth. Respect the depth. 

On a related note, sorry if I'm not harsh enough on USC for failing to deliver a recognizably USC-like performance in over a month -- I'm much kinder to the Trojans at No. 14 than any of the other human polls, which don't see fit to put SC inside the top 20 after the awful blowouts at the hands of Oregon and Stanford, with a lackluster effort at Arizona State sandwiched in between -- but the Trojans' top four wins (at Ohio State, at Cal, at Notre Dame and against Oregon State) probably make up the best quartet of trophies in the country; the only competition might come from Georgia Tech, Oregon or maybe Alabama. Considering its wins over both of the other three-loss teams in the conference, Cal and Oregon State, and the upcoming date with Arizona, it's no surprise that SC is still technically alive for a BCS berth as the Pac-10's No. 2 team. They're not going to get that bid, obviously, but the overall resumé in L.A. remains more impressive than the recent slide suggests.

. Penn State finishes the regular season with a marquee win over Northwestern, the only victim on the Lions' resumé with a winning record outside of Temple. Yes, Temple, still vying for an undefeated season in MAC play, now passes for a "quality win" in Happy Valley -- and still, I can't see fit to drop PSU below No. 12. Never underestimate the power of winning the ones you're supposed to. (Unless you happen to be Boise State or TCU, in which case you can get bent as far as the suits that run the big-money games are concerned.)

As always, everything will complete different next week. Full resumé chart for the record: