Football: Laval, Western, McMaster are my 1-2-3 ... #UAgree?

There is a format change for the football top 10 this season. Voters are now being asked to slot 15 of the 27 teams, so one can just imagine that Canadian Football Twitter will have some bun fights extraordinaire about those Nos. 8, 9 and 10 spots come about Week 6 of the regular season. The tabulated votes are weighted with the Elo Rating System that the national office has embraced for most of its team sports.

Official Top 10 before the jump, my ballot below. Here's the official one

U SPORTS Football is back, and so is the National Top 10 rankings / Le football U SPORTS est de retour et avec lui le Top 10 national@AUS_SUA | @CanadaWest | @OUAsport | @RSEQ1 | @CFL

🔗EN: https://t.co/gGgtet4AHy / 🔗FR: https://t.co/vfrJNfpyDj pic.twitter.com/UWzdRnlwPA

— U SPORTS (@USPORTSca) August 27, 2019

How each team's ranking broke down along media-vote and ELO lines is easy enough to find. Laval, Western, Saskatchewan and Ottawa's tallies were 50/50. Montréal's and McMaster's were like 48/52.

Calgary and UBC did better with the human voters, while Carleton and St. Francis Xavier were elevated by ELO.

As an 11-year voter, I treat it as a cascading series of snap decisions, especially early in the season, and try to eyeball it with recent conference strength.

Another arbitrary simplification is deciding upfront to have a quota from each conference. With the 15-team requirement that breaks down to 6 from Ontario, 4 from Canada West, 3 from the RSEQ and 2 from AUS.

How I voted:

1. Laval (RSEQ). Jusqu'à ce que quelqu'un prouve le contraire. Scored the second-most points of Week 1 by dumping 41 on Sherbrooke.
2. Western (OUA). Run that Laval quote through Google Translate. Maybe someone is coming out of the OUA's seven-team pointy-ball peloton to challenge the Purple Ponies. Or not.
   
   By the way, does anyone know when was the last time Western's offense only ran 51 plays?
3. McMaster (OUA). Two-touchdown win at Guelph with both teams in their first game with new head coaches looks impressive.
4. Calgary (CW). Basic default pick. No one in Canada West has played yet. Calgary was third in media points (235) but eighth in ELO points (152). Somewhat conversely,  No. 7 St. Francis Xavier had meager media support (44 points) but was fourth in ELO points (228).
5. Montréal (RSEQ). About the lowest one can rank the Carabins as long as they have a schedule that 97 per cent guarantees they will go no worse than 6-2.
6. Ottawa (OUA). Bye team in Week 1 visits McMaster on Sunday.
7. Saskatchewan (CW). No idea what the hierarchy is in Canada West so we'll send some faith the green dogs' way.
8. Concordia (RSEQ). They limited Montréal to 10 points.
9. Manitoba (CW). The third team out of the last four that people often seem to overlook, but I don't have the receipts to say that.
10. UBC (CW). Bearish on the T-Birds till their post-Michael O'Connor offence shows what it can do.
11. Laurier (OUA). Might be giving them too much credit for staying within two scores of Western. Connor Carusello passed for 360 yards, but there was a lot of catch-up on that burger.
12. Carleton (OUA). Better to focus on how Jack Cassar and Shalheem Charles-Brown, and the Ravens defence helped grit out an 18-12 win at Queen's. Carleton had an exceptional amount of early-season entropy — 20 penalties, three lost fumbles including a strip-sack that became a safety, and a field goal that would have iced the game in the final 90 seconds was blocked.  Tanner DeJong only tried 18 passes, but four were chunk-yardage shots downfield that kept the Ravens going in a field-position game.
13. Waterloo (OUA). The Warriors' wondrous Tre Ford matching his 2018 interception total in the first half of Week 1 might seem notable, but ipso facto, it takes time for receivers and quarterbacks to make adjustments and those limited Aug. 25 offensive schemes might make D-backs more emboldened about jumping a route.
    
    Waterloo went scoreless on 11 out of 12 possessions at one point against the U of T, but produced an 84-yard drive to regain their cushion when it was needed.
    
    Stat of the week: the U of T and the Toronto Argonauts' quarterbacks passed for 935 yards on Sunday. Both teams lost.
14. Acadia (AUS). High score of the week with 53 points against Bishop's. Where have you gone, Tommy Europe?
15. St. Francis Xavier (AUS). Mount Allison outgained the X-Men by 150-plus yards and its D made three interceptions, which added up to six points. Feels like a metaphor for my life.

Next week's Top 10 (15) will come out a day later due to the Labour Day holiday.