[CTcard]

Indeed.  We might call him John "Circular Reasoning" Wilner:

I am a little torn on Mr. Circular Reasoning.

I like the fact that he tries to bring logic to his choices, doesn't stick slavishly to what he did the week before, and wants to primarily base his choices on results. But, he doesn't seem to quite understand what he is doing, opening himself up to both circular reasoning and arbitrary data selection.

The key problem right now is that he wants his ballot to be completely results based despite the fact it is week #1, so only a few teams have played reasonable opponents and even among the others we don't really know how good any team is yet.

So there are all sorts of odd things in there.
I'll choose the one affecting Stanford for now.

Once we account for the teams with marquee victories, the guesswork truly begins with Ohio State, Michigan, TCU, Washington and Stanford in the No. 9 – 13 spots — all teams that I believe are top shelf but didn’t record substantive results.

Well, one of those teams played a Power 5 opponent that was in a bowl game last year, and generally expected to be better this year. Naturally that team came in at the end of this list. Another struggled with an FCS team; they came in mid-group.

And not quite apropos of anything, looking over the ESPN list of scores for Week #1 is kind of funny in that there is one team that appears twice. And they put in some serious travel miles. Sure hoped Michigan paid up the big bucks.

[CTcard]

Indeed.  We might call him John "Circular Reasoning" Wilner:

I am a little torn on Mr. Circular Reasoning.

I like the fact that he tries to bring logic to his choices, doesn't stick slavishly to what he did the week before, and wants to primarily base his choices on results. But, he doesn't seem to quite understand what he is doing, opening himself up to both circular reasoning and arbitrary data selection.

The key problem right now is that he wants his ballot to be completely results based despite the fact it is week #1, so only a few teams have played reasonable opponents and even among the others we don't really know how good any team is yet.

So there are all sorts of odd things in there.
I'll choose the one affecting Stanford for now.

Once we account for the teams with marquee victories, the guesswork truly begins with Ohio State, Michigan, TCU, Washington and Stanford in the No. 9 – 13 spots — all teams that I believe are top shelf but didn’t record substantive results.

Well, one of those teams played a Power 5 opponent that was in a bowl game last year, and generally expected to be better this year. Naturally that team came in at the end of this list. Another struggled with an FCS team; they came in mid-group.

And not quite apropos of anything, looking over the ESPN list of scores for Week #1 is kind of funny in that there is one team that appears twice. And they put in some serious travel miles. Sure hoped Michigan paid up the big bucks.