Per our commitments to the BlogPoll, TrojanWire will be participating in the weekly BlogPoll Roundtable this season. This week we kick it off with BlogPoll Numero Uno, featuring questions about preseason polling, more preseason polling, and Scott Bakula. Yes, you read that correctly — Scott Bakula.

1. What’s the biggest ripoff in this preseason poll? Either pick a team that’s offensively over or underrated, or you can rag on a particular voter’s bad pick (hey, we’re all adults here, we can handle it).
I can’t believe I’m about to type this — but Oklahoma at #16 is pretty crazy. After being a consistent Top 10 preseason pick, they lose a marginal QB in Rhett Bomar (and replace him with a Senior), and everyone drops them 5-10 slots. Also, just in general, Texas getting 11 #1 votes suggests that a significant chunk of voters firmly adhere to the “whoever was #1 at the end of last season is automatically #1 to start this season” rule. Otherwise we’re pretty sure 11 teams would not be betting on this Longhorn team to be the first since Bernie Kosar’s Hurricanes to win a championship with a first-year QB. (Points to us for working Bernie Kosar into our first Roundtable).

2. What should a preseason poll measure? Specifically, should it be a predictor of end-of-season standing (meaning that a team’s schedule should be taken into account when determining a ranking), or should it merely be a barometer of talent/hype/expectations?
Preseason rankings are always going to be a crapshoot. Assigning additional criteria like “don’t pay attention to their schedule strength” doesn’t change that any. A preseason Top 25 should be the rankings the way you think they will finish the season. The teams you see playing for the title should be 1-2, and if a team doesn’t look real tough on the field, but has a schedule that makes more than 2 losses an almost certain impossibility, they should be in your Top 25.

3. What is your biggest stretch in your preseason ballot? That is to say, which team has the best chance of making you look like an idiot for overrating them?
We’re looking towards Arizona for this one. Either the Sun Devils or Wildcats are going to make us look like an idiot. It’s almost a certainty that one of them will take a big dump this year. We’re hoping it’s the Sun Devils, since they barely cracked our Top 25.

4. What do you see as the biggest flaw in the polling system (both wire service and blogpolling)? Is polling an integral part of the great game of college football, or is it an outdated system that needs to be replaced? If you say the latter, enlighten us with your new plan.
The polling system is fine — once the season gets going. But unfortunately, by the time we’ve actually had a chance to see what any of these teams can do, they’ve already been saddled with a preseason ranking, for better or worse. Now, if you start the season top 5, and lose early, you’re thrilled that preseason hype will buoy your chances to overcome an early loss. But if you start the season way down the charts/unranked, that same early loss can be a killer of bowl hopes. While we know it’s never going to happen, we’d love to see much less emphasis put on any rankings until some actual games have been played.

5. You’re Scott Bakula, and you have the opportunity to “Quantum Leap” back in time and change any single moment in your team’s history. It can be a play on the field, a hiring decision, or your school’s founders deciding to build the campus in Northern Indiana, of all godforsaken places. What do you do?
This is easy — we’d be Scott Bakula in episode #44, Private Dancer. This is the one where he went back to 1979 and found himself in the life of “Rod the Bod”, the Chippendales dancer who has to convince a deaf girl that she should stop working in strip clubs and follow her dreams of dancing in a professional dance group. It’d give us a chance to revisit the swingin’ 1970’s AND help out a deaf girl with a heart of gold. You can’t do much better than that.

Oh, you meant football? Pretty sure we’d be heading back to January 4th of this year. But in all honesty, if we could time travel back to any game/USC team moment, we’d probably just suck it up, take the L to Texas, and breeze back to last October in Notre Dame. We could spend the rest of our lives reliving that final drive, and it still wouldn’t be enough.