Admiral James Stockdale survived by holding two ideas at once. He kept faith that he would prevail in the end, and he kept the discipline to face the brutal facts in front of him.

College football offers a much less serious version of the same paradox. We trust that the season will sort itself out. We also have to admit that, five weeks in, much of the evidence is still confusing.

Teams rise, fall and sometimes vanish in a single Saturday. The order changes faster than we can explain it. Underneath that noise, though, the shape of the field is getting clearer.

The brutal facts

Florida entered the weekend ranked second and sitting in Tier 1. Then Missouri beat the Gators. Voters dropped Florida to ninth and into Tier 3, while Missouri climbed from 30th and Tier 4 to 12th and also into Tier 3.

Texas remained No. 1, but its index fell. Texas did not get worse. The index is relative, and its field average is fixed at 100. When other teams strengthen their cases, the leader’s share of the total can decline. Alabama is the other side of that. It leapfrogged from fourth to second, and set up its date with Georgia who held third but moved into Tier 1.

If you read this poll as a power rating, those swings look irrational. It isn’t one. Each week adds evidence to a year-to-date resume. One big win can change that evidence a lot, and one loss can make voters rethink what they believed.

The process is volatile because the evidence is incomplete.

Clarity at the top

Despite all the movement, two groups have separated from the field.

Tier 1: Texas, Alabama, Georgia. These three hold almost two-thirds of the index.

Tier 2: Miami, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Indiana. With Tier 1, the top seven hold more than 82%.

The gaps are large. Georgia is at 725 and Miami is next at 365, a drop of almost half. Indiana closes Tier 2 at 140, and Texas Tech follows at 72, another drop of almost half.

That gives two clear ledges:

• Texas, Alabama and Georgia have the strongest resumes.
• Miami, Ohio State, Notre Dame and Indiana are the main pursuit group.
• Everyone else is fighting through a broad, unsettled middle.

The analysis supports both breaks. I didn’t draw these tiers by eye to tidy up the chart. They are the divisions that held up across repeated refits of the model.

Different questions, same seven

The AP poll and the MaxDiff poll disagree on the order. Notre Dame is third in the AP poll and sixth here. Alabama is sixth in the AP poll and second here.

Both polls still put the same seven teams at the top: Texas, Georgia, Notre Dame, Miami, Ohio State, Alabama and Indiana.

That dis/agreement matters. The AP asks voters for a traditional ranking. MaxDiff asks them for many small best-and-worst resume judgments. The two methods produce different orders but the same membership.

Below the top seven, the two polls split further. Pittsburgh is 10th here and 25th in the AP. Florida is ninth here and 16th in the AP. Oklahoma State (18th) and UCLA (21st) are ranked by the AP but are not among the 50 teams in the MaxDiff field (Sorry u/bigmouthsmiles). Resume voters and AP voters are reading the middle very differently.

Confront the confusion

After seventh, certainty declines sharply.

Texas Tech opens Tier 3 at eighth, and 21 teams share that tier down to Arizona at 28th. Their bars give an estimated order, but the model doesn’t support treating every neighboring spot as a real difference.

That is the brutal fact of this season: the top is separating and the middle is still crowded. We can say both things without claiming more confidence than the evidence supports.

We don’t know yet which teams will last. We shouldn’t pretend we do.

But we can confront what is in front of us. Seven teams have started to separate. Three have built the clearest cases. Everyone else is still asking us to believe.

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.