Okay, here’s VFRT’s initial pre-season BlogPoll. Many thanks to Brian for pulling this together.

This should be a team effort from the entire VFRT community, so please comment on the poll below. I need to finalize it before 10:00 a.m. Wednesday. Here are the rules:

Teams should be ranked without regard to future schedules. Please don’t rank Purdue high because they miss Michigan and Ohio State this year. Teams should also not be ranked on their performance in previous years. At all times it should be an approximate ranking who would beat who on a neutral field this year.

Winning counts… but style counts, too. There just aren’t enough games to make a true determination of who’s number one without taking a vague impressiveness factor into account. That’s life in college football.

So, we can’t account for the schedule. We can’t rank Georgia ahead of Florida based on a belief that while Florida may beat Georgia head to head, Florida will lose more SEC games and thus place second in the SEC East.

So, best guess as to how the teams would stack up against each other on a neutral field on September 2:

Rank	Team	Delta
1	Ohio State	25
2	Notre Dame	24
3	Texas	23
4	Southern Cal	22
5	Auburn	21
6	West Virginia	20
7	Florida	19
8	Cal	18
9	Louisiana State	17
10	Florida State	16
11	Miami (Florida)	15
12	Louisville	14
13	Michigan	13
14	Georgia	12
15	Iowa	11
16	Virginia Tech	10
17	Clemson	9
18	Penn State	8
19	Nebraska	7
20	Tennessee	6
21	Oregon	5
22	Oklahoma	4
23	Boston College	3
24	Texas Tech	2
25	Arizona State	1

College Football News’ Pete Fiutak had this to say when asked whether Tennessee could turn it around in only one season:

It’s easy to dump on last year’s Tennessee team, but it really wasn’t all that bad. Yeah, it lost to Vanderbilt, but the team was demoralized by the end of the year that it was a shadow of its former self. Look at the other five losses: 16-7 at Florida. 27-14 vs. Georgia. 6-3 at Alabama helped by a bad bounce fumble through the end zone and a long pass at the end that probably should’ve been offensive pass interference on the Tide. 16-15 to South Carolina on a late field goal. 41-21 at Notre Dame. Those aren’t losses to be all that ashamed of. Just a little bit more offensive production makes the Vols at least 7-2 going into the Vanderbilt game and everything would be fine. While the defense might take a little bit of a dip this year, the offense is almost certain to be better. The quarterbacking can’t be worse with Cutcliffe tutoring Erik Ainge.

By the way, CFN has the Vols at No. 10 preseason and are predicting a matchup against Penn State in the Outback Bowl on January 1, 2007.

If you haven’t visited SportsAnimal99.com’s interview page recently, you should. There are new interviews with Erik Ainge, Arian Foster and Demetrice Morley, among others.

The quarterbacks will not be wearing green jerseys for the Vols’ first major scrimmage today. It’s another aspect of the coaches’ focus on timing and tempo. The offense and the defense will go live at game speed, and the coaches will find out what the various QBs will do when they hear the footsteps coming. Because the QBs will be live, the offensive line will be critical today.

Two big fears: a QB getting hurt and backup QB Jonathan Crompton shining thereby sparking a QB controversy. One of Crompton’s strengths is apparently running, and if he responds to the pressure well and Ainge does not, well, let’s not go there. On the optimistic side of things, this is the first time the QBs will shed their green jerseys in the preseason since they did it with Tee Martin in 1998.

John Adams has a nice article on offensive tackle Chris Scott, who’s the poster boy for the o-line’s and the team’s weight loss campaign. He’s lost 60 pounds since last season.

Three weeks, folks.