Badger football starts the season at #7 in the AP poll

Just like in the Coaches Poll. It's exciting that expectations for this team are so high. After watching the Packers demolish the Seahawks 48-13, it's finally time to acknowledge that we need to fast-forward through the remainder of August and get football season going.

I do enjoy the AP's new policy of full transparency; you can see the ballots of each voter every week. (Quick request of the geeks out there: is there any way one of you could write a script that will take the data from each ballot and put it into a convenient, sortable, single-page format? Let me know.) It doesn't appear that everything is updated at the AP's site quite yet, but of the polls in which preseason rankings are visible, the Badgers are ranked as highly as fourth (by three voters) and fall outside of the top ten on four ballots. The cast of College Gameday doesn't appear to think the Badgers will live up to the hype, as both Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit place UW at #11. (Herbstreit's ballot is interesting, as he also ranks Michigan #10. His top Big Ten team? Penn State, at #7.) One voter ranked UW #14; let it be known that David Birkett of the Oakland Press is officially On Notice, especially considering that he's got the Wolverines at #2.

UPDATE 8/20/07: Ach! A 23rd place vote!! This dude's in South Bend; fortunately he didn't have the audacity to rank the Irish ...