On h2h:
Yes, it's meaningless, BUT
the new AP poll, looking at the top 10:
UM is at 10, right behind MSU. Behind the team that beat them. Cool.
Ahead of MSU is ND, who is behind their only loss - Cincinnati. Good.
Above them is OSU, who is right behind the team they lost to: Oregon. Great.
So all of the above is true, yet Oregon's only loss isn't to anyone above them....not to anyone in the top 10....not to anyone even ranked.
Voters are idiotic sheeple. Inconsistent. Vapid. Hypocritical.
It's not even about WHEN a team loses, as Oregon's bad loss was 3 weeks after OSU lost to the Ducks.
None of it makes sense.
Ok...
The "AP Poll" isn't an opinion. It doesn't have to be consistent.
There are 63 voters. They all vote individually. And then the AP Poll is just the single output from a combination of 63 disparate inputs.
Which means that if the voters all agree in lockstep, there should be exactly 63 point gaps between each spot in the poll.
Maybe many of those voters think that Oregon and Ohio State are better than ND, MSU, and M. I don't watch that much Oregon, but I can say that *I* think Ohio State is better than those three teams. Oregon has a bad loss, but they also beat Ohio State--nobody else to date has done that. Nobody else to date has stayed within 9 points of OSU, and most of OSU's games haven't even been anywhere near that close.
Points-wise, it appears that the collective "wisdom" of the voters is that both Oregon and OSU are significantly behind OU--there is an 87 point gap between OU and Oregon. And they believe there's a significant gap down to ND, there is a 154 point gap between OSU and ND. Yet there's only a 26-point gap between Oregon and OSU... MUCH smaller than the 63 that you would expect if they all agreed. That could easily be explained by a couple of outlier voters.
Then between ND at 7, and M at 9, there's only a 67 point gap covering those three spots--101 points across 4 spots if you include OkSU at 10th. 4 spots "should" be 252 points between them if the voters all agreed. Heck, three spots should be 189 points and it's only 67 points, four above what you'd expect for a single-spot gap, between three positions on the poll.
The same thing shows up in the 2-4 spot. Cincinnati at #2 is 135 points behind Georgia which is unanimous at #1,
and then there is a mere 34 point gap down two spots to #4. Again you'd expect an even distribution of 189 spots if voters agreed on which teams were #2-#4. But they don't. They can't agree at all who should be #2, and hence the points gap between #1 and #2 is over double what is "expected", and the points gap between #2 and #4 is only 18% what is "expected".
I'm sure if those 63 voters all got into a room and argued about it (like the committee), they might actually start to align their rankings and you'd see something closer to even 63-point gaps between teams on the rankings. The fact that you DON'T see something even remotely approaching even point gaps between the rankings suggests that it's NOT groupthink and there's significant disparities in the way they assign their ranks.