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Zach already weighed in a bit about this, but I thought I'd expand.  The real reason why head-to-head competition doesn’t matter in college football:

Miami 38 –  FSU 34
FSU 54 – BYU 28
Miami     #17
BYU    #20
FSU    Unranked (0 votes)

Washington 16 – USC 13
Stanford 34 – Washington 14
USC        #7
Stanford    #35
Washington    Unranked

South Carolina 16 – Ole Miss 10
Ole Miss    #21
S. Carolina    Unranked

The rankings were a popular talking point over the weekend by the biggest names in the college football media.  Sunday (aside from NFL talk) my Twitter stream was filled with questions about the polls using head to head results, relative scores, and the Week 4 AP and Coach’s Polls.

So if head-to-head is the end all, be all then shouldn't FSU be in the rankings ahead of BYU? And didn't FSU push Miami to the brink? So where is FSU in the rankings? You say they lost last week, and BYU won?  But FSU blew BYU off their own field by 16.  And by the transitive property doesn't that make Stanford definitively better than USC?

Acting shocked at these results is naïve, and disingenuous.  First off, many of those writers hold votes in the AP.  I wouldn’t expect them to be beholden to head-to-head competition in every poll because it is flat out impossible.  What happens if a team loses just because it was a bad day?  Do people really think USC is worse than Washington?  Should I believe that because Stanford trounced the Huskies I should expect the Cardinal to beat up on the Trojans?  Nobody thinks like that.  Pretending otherwise is pointless.