quote:
Because there are two schools of thought when it comes to polls. 1. Going strictly by how the teams are currently playing 2. Basing you poll on how you feel a team should be ranked and/or where they will end up at the end of the season Clearly you go by #1 but #2 is also a valid method.

I disagree with you on #2. Basing your poll on where you think they will end up is not a valid method. You end up rewarding teams for playing a weak schedule and penalizing teams for playing a tough one.

For instance, let's say you think a team is really good but they play a really tough schedule, and you think another team is not as good but they play a really weak schedule. You can predict that the better team will have a lesser record because of their schedule, then you rank them lower even though you think they are better. So you have already penalized them for losing games they haven't even played yet. Then, as the season plays out, if they actually do lose some of those games, you drop them even further because they lost, effectively penalizing them twice for each loss.

The only valid way to rank teams is to put them in order of how good you think they are, then adjust your rankings (or not) based on performance that deviates from (or confirms) your expectations of how good they are. A team's quality, in your estimation, should move up or down only if they perform better or worse than you thought they should. And it should stay the same if they perform the same as you thought. I say "quality" here instead of ranking because it is inherent in the concept of ranking that teams can move up or down without doing anything good or bad because of what other teams do.