Week 2: Retribution Voting

So my pet theory last week just got blown to all hell this week.  (Or at least close to all hell.)  What happened?  Well, Ohio State lost (dammit).  Michigan bit it.  Iowa went down.  Arizona State lost a close thriller (I wish I had seen that game; I was listening to it with Jim Wheatley on our way to the Saturday late night venue at Bal Jam), and TCU got to experience the same treatment they pulled on Oklahoma, getting bounced by SMU, of all teams.

So what happened in the theory?  Well:

Michigan - #3 AP (#3 USA Today) to #14 AP (#14 USA Today)
Ohio State - #4 AP (#7 USA Today) to #9 AP (#9 USA Today)
Iowa - #8 AP (#8 USA Today) to #22 AP (#21 USA Today)
Arizona State - #15 AP (#15 USA Today) to #18 AP (#22 USA Today)
TCU - #22 AP (unranked) to unranked in both polls

So what on earth happened here?  Ohio State, Arizona State, and TCU were the only ones who came close to staying in line with the theory, and even those first two have oddities.  AZ St. should've dropped to #20 or so, probably #21, given that it was a home loss.  However, the loss was to a higher ranked team (something which I think I'm going to have to take into consideration at some point, but I want to see a pattern established before I say anything on it).... and that's all I got.  No clue here.  The reasoning is probably the same behind why OSU only dropped 2(!) spots in the USA Today poll.  I don't know why that happened, either.

Of course, those are the sane cases.  Why the hell did Michigan drop 11 spots and Iowa drop 14?  The only thing I can think of is retribution.  I mean, maybe there's an Irish bias here with Michigan, but they shouldn't have slipped out of the top 10 by that logic (or at the worst, dropped to 11th, behind ND).  Of course, neither poll has ever taken into account actually putting teams in order of how they've won and such before (see Tennessee being behind Georgia in the rankings last year, even after beating them AT Georgia).  No clue why this happened - but Michigan'll probably get corrected in the next couple of weeks.  As for Iowa, I guess that the "darkhorse" potential BCS team must count against something - it was a bad loss (probably good for another drop of 2); even with that, they should be around #18.  I'm gonna chalk this up to an outlier week, unless I see more of it.