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My bad, Baylor. I do think you should be in my AP Top 25 poll this week...despite what the poll actually says.

(AP)

Did you get dropped on your head when you were a child or something?

That gentle ice breaker was the first line of an email I received from a gentleman named JB.

I'm used to readers having passionate opinions, but I have to admit that is one I haven't heard in awhile.

What could cause a reader to question my mental state that much? Let's look at the rest of JB's email.



"I can see no justification for having them unranked. You want to put them in the 20's because they only played Buffalo, then that's fine (be sure you do the same thing to OSU) but to leave them out completely shows that you know very little about football."

JB was talking about Baylor. How could I leave them unranked?

After I got a hearty chuckle from JB's email, an uneasy feeling hit me.

Wait a second, did I forget to ... *(pulls up AP Top 25 page, finds "Brent Axe poll.")*

Oh man. I had done it.

A mistake in my poll.

Sitting there at No. 21 was Texas. I meant to put Baylor in that spot.

Darn it.

Hey, Baylor is in Texas, but that won't earn me any brownie points here.

Full disclosure. I usually spend a couple hours on Sunday mornings wrapping up my poll before I submit it to AP by our mid-morning deadline. I didn't have that luxury this week as I had an early morning flight out of Chicago on Sunday.

I could use the excuse of staring at a computer screen in a suburban Chicago hotel at 1:45 a.m. after wrapping up Syracuse football coverage duty and waiting for all the Top 25 games to be done.

But I won't.

I screwed up. Plain and simple. The good folks at the AP beg and plead with with us to check and double check our poll before we hit send. I didn't check enough.

I mean, we aren't talking about a major screw up here. It's not like I forgot to include Alabama or Oregon.

I like Baylor. I ranked them No.23 last week.

Anyway, good news, Baylor fans. You squad is ranked in the poll even though I failed to include them in mine and seven other AP voters did not include them as well (I'm not sure if their apologies are forthcoming or not).

My man Ralph Russo of the Associated Press, a terrific college football writer and one of our poll overlords, informs me that even if I had voted for Baylor like I wanted, they wouldn't have moved a spot either way from their new No. 22 ranking.

So, there's that.

But I'm glad this happened, because when I slip up like this, the JB's of the world will find me via email and give me the business for it. And I deserve it.

By the way, JB, to answer your question, no I was not dropped on my head as a kid.

But I did have a bad accident where I followed my dad down a set of basement stairs in a baby walker (true story).

But I'm not going to use that as an excuse for leaving Baylor off the poll either.

My full poll (with a correction for Baylor replacing Texas at No. 21) for this week is below.

If you would like to take issue with what you see below, please do so in the comments, via email, or find me on Twitter @BrentAxeMedia.

Just don't steal JB's "head drop" line.

1. Alabama

2. Ohio State

3. Oregon

4. Clemson

5. Stanford

6. Louisville

7. Georgia

8. Florida State

9. Texas A&M

10. Michigan

11. LSU

12. Oklahoma St

13. Oklahoma

14. South Carolina

15. Northwestern

16. Nebraska

17. Miami

18. Florida

19. Wisconsin

20. Notre Dame

21. Texas...err...Baylor

22. UCLA

23. Northern Illinois

24. Ole Miss

25. Washington

Out: Texas (with correction), USC.

In: Washington, Ole Miss.

Brent Axe

baxe@syracuse.com

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Find me on Twitter @BrentAxeMedia