Rutgers is now the #25 team in the Associated Press poll, and #28 in the USA Today poll. I don't believe that is warranted, considering the schedule that Rutgers has played this year. They have a talented, young roster, and are just starting to play their best football, but I can't in good conscience see them as a top 25 team when they are 85th statistically in offense (usual caveats apply, blah blah), and had looked awful on that side of the ball before last week. That's saying a lot, considering that not many of the teams outside of the top 10 look all that tough. Intuitively, they should be closer to between the 30 to 40 range. It's a nice selling point for the program though, and Coach Schiano gets a cool $10,000 bonus.
Me, I'm more concerned with whether or not UConn can beat Notre Dame this week, which might be the only way that Rutgers can get to a half decent bowl game for once.
It's not something that I'm that interested in harping on though. Rutgers is the latest beneficiary of voters not considering strength of schedule, and overrating more recent wins over an entire season resume, but they're hardly the sole offender. How else can you explain rating Penn State over Iowa, when the Hawkeyes have played a much tougher schedule, and soundly beat the Nittany Lions on the road? That's just one of a countless number of discrepancies. I think the 'net blogpoll is somewhat of an improvement, but it's still fatally flawed, and subject to the same biases. No matter their flaws, computer statistical models give the best, most objective determination of the relative strength between teams and conferences. In fact, the computers need to be unrestrained and unleashed, as current BCS policy bars consideration of margin of victory, despite the fact that taking the points into account is more predictive of future results than solely looking at W/L records.