There seems to be some disagreement among the various polls. Nothing unusual there. But let me mention a few criteria that are important to consider. For one thing, are the polls supposed to measure and rank a team by its whole season, or by how strong the team is RIGHT NOW? To me, the ranking at the moment is most important to "know" and therefore a system of weighting recent games over less recent games should be a component of a good poll IMO. For example, would you, as a theoretical opponent, want to play Minnesota now or back in Dec.? How\ about Maine--play them now or in Dec.? I think, obviously, that Minnesota should not be overly penalized for their early season pratfalls. Another component of a good poll is to adjust very lopsided scores to "merely" reflect a good beating. I don't believe that 11-2 is sig- nificantly worse than 4 or 5 to 1 in the whupping dept. Yet another component of a good poll, for me, would be a disregard for empty net goals. Many games end up 4-2 or even 5-2 which were REALLY 3-2 games. In these matters, I am referring to COMPUTER polls (which sometimes have such quantified parameters) but the same ideas should prevail in opinion polls too. In my opinion.