There is this Las Vegas Sports Consultants Poll (also called the Oddsmakers Poll) that gets a good bit of attention in the blogosphere as being a more objective poll than the AP, Coaches, Harris, or BCS. One of the biggest proponents of this poll is Dan Steinberg, a sportswriter for the Washington Post. Anyway, this Las Vegas Sports Consultants Poll is a poll released by this firm -- http://www.lvsc.com/lvscteam.html They are supposedly the leading consultant for Las Vegas sports books and their poll is a composite of their expert rankings, which are used to formulate the firm's recommended lines. According to their website, they are "the world's largest oddsmaking company," they are "the world's most respected authority," they are "the most valued commodity for sports gaming all over the world," and they are the "reason" that "Las Vegas is the source for all U.S. sports gaming odds." http://www.lvsc.com/about.html You can see their college football poll here -- http://vegassportsconnect.com/poll_cfb_week12.html (where you can see how they ranked the teams in the preseason and how they ranked them from weeks 1 to current) Currently, they have LSU at #12. In their preseason poll, they had LSU at #15. As for SEC teams in general, they currently rank them: #1 Florida, #7 Bama, #9 Georgia, #12 LSU, #18 South Carolina
Isn't it odd that the ESPN fan poll and the vegas poll are fairly close together[usually, not this week..]? Maybe us fans know more then we thought we did.
Interestingly USC has the best odds to win the national championship, along with Florida. You can't win it if you don't get to actually play the game.
Basically their top 25 is ranked according to who would win on a neutral field and obviously doesn't match up with our current system. Im not so sure once money started coming in that USC would be favored over Florida. EDIT - I see USC is no longer #1.
Yeah they rank them like I rank them in my top 15 list, and thus you see Bama in 6th place, which is where they belong. Looks like they aren't quite buying into Tech like I am, however. USC isn't good enough offensively to be that high.
