Well, having just completed my Week 2 ballot for the Associated Press Top 25, I can say that was probably the strangest rankings compiling exercise I’ll ever conduct.
For starters, the 62 voters were asked to drop all the schools who are not playing football right now, so that wiped out nine teams from my preseason ballot due to inactivity. General incompetency jettisoned another team (Iowa State, a 31-14 loser to Louisiana-Lafayette) so 10 teams had to be replaced.
Then there’s the covid-19 factor. Memphis halted football activities late last week due to “significant” numbers of players in quarantine due to contact tracing protocols, as well as an unspecified number of positive tests.