Last week’s review ended by asking who the real UT was, wondering aloud whether we might see a return of the king, noting that Ole Miss would defend its crown on the road in Gainesville, and passing along that some had already anointed LSU–Texas A&M the Anxiety Bowl.

Saturday answered all four. Texas won 20–17 in Knoxville. The king returned. The crown was lost in Gainesville, 52–28. And LSU ended Texas A&M 35–6 before October arrived, exactly as advertised.

The poll reckoned accordingly. Texas is back at No. 1. Florida vaulted from 10th to second. Ole Miss, which a week ago was top tier, is now at the bottom of Tier 2.

A New Top Two

Texas and Florida are the only Tier 1 teams, and together they account for roughly 57 percent of the full fixed-field index.

What the two of them did to get there could not have looked more different. Florida hung 52 on the No. 1 team in this poll. Texas won by three on the road.

That contrast is worth sitting with, because this electorate spent September punishing exactly that kind of win. Michigan survived Western Michigan 13–12 in Week 1 and fell 33 places. Washington beat Utah State 16–14 in Week 2 and fell 21. Texas won by three and reclaimed the throne. The difference was the opponent. A road win over a ranked Tennessee is a line on a resume in a way that a one-score escape against a MAC team never was, and our voters have been consistent about this since the first ballot. The scoreboard is not the evidence. The schedule is.

Georgia Is an Island

Third place is the strangest result in the poll.

Georgia sits at No. 3. Across 2,000 whole-voter bootstrap refits, it never once finished anywhere else. That makes Georgia’s the only completely pinned position in the entire field. More certain than Texas at No. 1.

It is also completely isolated. The two steepest cliffs in the top ten fall on either side of it: Florida to Georgia is a 58.6 percent drop, and Georgia to Alabama is a 56.8 percent drop. Georgia is not closing on the top tier and it is in no danger from below. It occupies its own floor of the building, and the voters are more certain of that than they are of anything else they told us this week.

Ole Miss Got the Receipt

Seven days ago the Rebels sat first. Then they went to Gainesville, lost 52–28, and came back holding No. 10.

Ole Miss shed roughly 95 percent of its measured resume support in a single Saturday. Nothing in three previous editions comes close.

That is not a claim the Rebels became the tenth-best team in the country overnight. It is what happens when a resume is built on one enormous result and that result gets answered. A loss does not erase what came before it, but it reprices it, and this one was repriced violently.

The Middle Finally Sorted

For three weeks the honest complaint about this poll was that everything below the leaders sat in one enormous holding pen. Week 1 produced four tiers, one of which swallowed 37 teams. Week 2, four again. Week 3, five.

Week 4 produced seven, on 211 ballots—our largest sample of the season, up 35 percent from last week.

Georgia begins an 11-team Tier 2 that runs through LSU at No. 13. Inside it, Alabama, Miami and Ohio State are functionally a three-way tie for fourth with overlapping intervals. Oregon starts Tier 3 at No. 14, and that tier continues through Houston at No. 25. The bars estimate an order within those groups; the tiers are the more conservative statement about where the clearest divisions survived.

This is the chaff separating from the wheat, and it happened the way everything in this poll happens: suddenly and violently. One Saturday when enough teams finally played somebody was enough to trigger the changes.

Working Takeaway

Four weeks have produced four different shapes at the top. It restored Texas, elevated Florida into a two-team top tier, and stranded Georgia on an island between the sharpest cliffs on the board. The middle is separating into narrower groups at last. But the crown has already changed hands three times in four editions, and the next Saturday can still move every piece on this board.

How our FBS Resume MaxDiff poll works

Each voter saw 18 unique four-team groups and two separated repeat screens, choosing the strongest and weakest year-to-date resume in each group. Balanced forms distributed comparisons across the field, with randomized card order. Voters could skip unfamiliar groups instead of guessing.

After the poll closed, eligible choices were fit with the frozen symmetric MaxDiff model. Uncertainty and tier stability were estimated by resampling whole voters 2,000 times. Familiarity skips and repeat screens were not treated as additional preference choices.