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. The entire poll will be released later today.

This week's ballot is brought to you by inimitable curmudgeon Frank Deford, who remind readers to keep in mind the futility of it all:

Then again, the whole process is, well, rank, because, after all, nobody can possibly compare teams all over the country with any degree of intelligence. Nobody can even see many of them play. It's like being in Congress and voting on bills you know nothing about. So, it's very American.

Not everyone agrees with the last part, Frank, but the Doc waves the flag on his first ballot by celebrating not only the democratic act of voting but also the deeply American virtue of meritocracy: As always, the preseason rankings have been thrown aside to judge teams exclusively by their on-field merits to date. Everybody will adopt the "resumé" approach by the end of the season, but the goal here is to throw off assumptions and predictions to the greatest extent possible and maintain an internally consistent standard throughout the season. Think of it as a weekly snapshot of a constantly evolving beast. It's still subjective, and it's never easy.

Some assumptions, remain, of course: For the first week, teams are ranked essentially in order of the perceived strength of their opening day opponent coming into the season, with some adjustments for margin of victory. Strength of schedule is an enormously important factor in my consideration, and judging it accurately across a huge swath of varying schedules requires making new assumptions every week and discarding old ones. There will be a lot of natural turnover at the beginning of the season, but things will start to take shape by the time almost every team has played at least one big game by the end of September and become more rigid as we have more information.

No cupcakes allowed. Teams that opened against a I-AA opponent were not considered for this poll. Yes, that includes Florida, along with about half of the country. The Gators will make their way up the ladder when they win games that warrant moving them up the ladder, just like everyone else.

There were eight very impressive wins. I would say the top eight in this poll -- Alabama, BYU, Oklahoma State, Boise State, Missouri, Miami, Cincinnati and California -- clearly distinguished themselves with dramatic and in some cases very lopsided wins over quality (or perceived quality) outfits, led by Alabama, which dominated top-10/ACC favorite Virginia Tech far more than the 10-point margin suggests. I had 'Bama No. 1 after the beatdown it laid on ACC favorite Clemson to kick off last year, and Saturday night's effort was on par with that one for a Week One eye-opener.

Slots 10-21 are roughly equal. I'm not going to split a lot of hairs in this section, which (with the exception of South Carolina and Colorado State) consists exclusively of teams that beat respectable, higher-end mid-major programs, typically by a lot. Notre Dame, Michigan, Auburn, Ole Miss, Nebraska, Arizona and Bowling Green all handled '08 bowl teams by double digits. Ohio State wasn't so impressive against Navy, but the Midshipmen are a consistently successful program, compared to, say, Syracuse.

Southern Cal and Texas A&M fit into this category because San Jose State (6-6 last year) and New Mexico (five bowl games in seven years) are not the flimsiest tomato cans out there compared to some of the victims of teams in the "Waiting" category, and the Trojans and Aggies left them both strewn across the field in little pieces. Whether they should be above the best 0-1 teams is debatable, though.

I do not think Baylor, South Carolina, Colorado State and/or Bowling Green are any good. But this is not a predictive poll about where any of those teams will eventually finish; with what we know so far, based on what we thought coming in, their respective wins over Wake Forest, N.C. State, Colorado and Troy were among the best of the weekend when so much of the competition was scraping the bottom for an easy walk-over. Their status isn't likely to last long, not least because all of their victims looked terrible in defeat and may not be worth much as trophies by the end of the month.

Losing a competitive game against a quality team is better than throttling a deadbeat. The teams in the "waiting" category all laid the wood to various degrees to some of the worst I-A programs in the country, which doesn't count as much for me as putting up a fight against a really respectable outfit; Oklahoma, Navy, Florida State and even Virginia Tech, as thoroughly as the Hokies were trounced in the box score, all had chances to win their respective games against previously ranked opponents well into the fourth quarter. I'll take that over wiping out Akron.

As always, this will look completely different next week.