Thanks to scottishduck88 for the suggestion! You can now join a group showing your love of hate! Head on over to the Groups page and use the new awesome navigation to see all the groups you can join.

If you don’t see a group you want, you can request a group in the forums. Are you part of another website that would like to have their top 25 automatically calculated by this website? Just have the members there create a free account here, and request a group and have each member join (or the group leader can subscribe them). It sounds a lot more complicated than it is.

Yes, THAT Pete Carroll (of USC, you know?). Anyone have any other head coach twitter feeds? I expect the NCAA to strike down on this within a year as it counts as recruiting communication.

http://twitter.com/PeteCarroll

Congratulations to Florida! The BCS Fans have selected Florida as their 2008 National Champion. Utah earned a respectable second place with 11 first place for their perfect season. USC and Texas also received first place votes. Unfortunately, we lost 6 official pollsters for the final poll and didn’t gain any. Please help spread the word to your friends and family and get them on the site submitting their own poll. Everyone is welcome, and you can tell them how easy it really is.

2008 was a good growing season for the site. We invented the Brandon Rule, and had some good (and bad) discussions about what the site is really trying to do. Hopefully we can continue our success in growing and achieving greater numbers voting as an official pollster. Only one minor change for the site is planned during the off season: A new web hosting company, which will (hopefully) increase the speed and reliability of the site. The back-end calculations will compute faster and therefore be rendered faster when you load each page. If you have any suggestions for changes to the site, the suggestion box is always open: admin@bcsfanpoll.com.

Thanks for the great 2008 and we look forward to seeing you again in July for a great 2009! Good luck with the long off-season.

Congratulations to The Blitz for winning the 2008 season Pick ‘Em Game. Also congratulations to cfbfanatic for finishing second. These two were the only two to enter every week for the entire season. The game will be back for 2009. It will still be free of course. If you have an account here to vote, then you’re already signed up and ready to play. Just come weekly during the season and enter your picks to compete. There is no prize, but The Blitz can have the honor of besting 61 entrants. Quite the feat.

The Bowl Pick ‘Em games have been picked. The first game is The Poinsettia Bowl (Boise State vs. TCU) on Tuesday, December 23 at 8:00pm eastern time. The entry form will close shortly before the game starts. Although it may be difficult to pick games that occur weeks later, and your pick may change with injuries, everyone is in the same boat and can’t change their picks, so it’s fair for everyone. I may change the software in the off-season to close games as they are scheduled to start to allow folks to pick up until the last second. This would be the way it would work all season. Good luck!

Week 15 is finalized, despite some serious questions and a lot of discontent in the Honor Center, no official challenge to remove a poll or pollster has been created. The fans want to see Florida and Oklahoma. Barely. Texas finished just behind Oklahoma with 2 less first place votes and 34 less points total. Also notable is Utah receiving 2 first place votes.

There are a lot of great discussions going on in the forums. Check it out. There are several applications still going on for this week as well.

For the rest of the season, the polls will be closed until AFTER the BCS National Championship Game, where it will open for 1 week. All official pollsters must submit a ballot during that time period. Official pollsters are not forced or required to vote for the BCS National Champion as their #1 vote, and a honor challenge based upon that will be dismissed quickly and rejected. Non-official pollsters that reach their 4th week of polling, entitling them to apply for official status after the final poll, may do so immediately after they submit their poll.

The pick ‘em game will have selected bowl games and be open once the games are entered (if you want a specific game, just let me, MECU, know) until shortly before the first game begins.

Thank you everyone for making the BCS Fan Poll a great site again this season. Help spread the word to make next season even better.

Week 12 is finalized. As eew5000 lamented in the Official Pollsters Only forum, this was a very boring poll. Ignoring Texas’ drop from being tied #3 last week to #4, the top 17 remained unchanged for the official poll. Many pollsters didn’t change their top 15 at all. I prefer to think that we’re just really smart at figuring out who the better teams are.

In un-boring news, we have 4 applications currently going on. Please go to the forums Application Center and vote!

Week 11 is finalized. No change at the top except Penn State dropping 6 slots after their loss. Georgia Tech, West Virginia and Maryland dropped out of the top 25 making way for Cincinnati, Tulsa and Oregon State.

We gained 5 official pollsters, including 1 returning. Welcome to all 5: Crayton, erjopa, stevenra, DantePakistan, Trey (Brandon Rule). This brings the total official pollsters to 46. There were 77 total polls cast for week 11. Expect many more applications as we near the end of the season.

Finally, I am doing a little advertising on Facebook for the rest of November and another ad network. The profits of the site are being returned to increase exposure. If you are already aware of the site, please do not click the link. Save the money for someone else to click so the site can grow. The ads started this week and have brought over 100 new visitors to the site. Unfortunately not really converting them into registering an account, but perhaps they will discover us later and decide to join again.

Week 10 is finalized. A few questions for SOONERFLASH, and more discussion about “cookie cutter polls” (polls that fit easily into the mold like everyone else), but nothing that seems to be leaning towards an official honor challenge. We gained two new official pollsters, usbummer and cdavis627. We also have one application this week that seems to be sailing through, please go vote on arrabin56.

After Texas‘ loss to Texas Tech, Tech leaps into the #1 spot over Alabama and Penn State, receiving less first place votes than Alabama with just 3 points putting them as #1. It’s a close race. Penn State is 15 points back from Tech. Five teams earned a first place vote; the three already mentioned and Oklahoma and Florida (see SOONERFLASH above). Minnesota, Oregon, and South Florida all drop out leaving room for Georgia Tech, West Virginia and Maryland.

With just 6 weeks left in the season, will the undefeateds able to keep their streak alive? Will the BCS have to pick between multiple undefeateds? Will Utah, Boise State, or Ball State be able to crash the BCS bowl picture? Just another great college football season.