I seem to recall learning about GIGO (Garbage-in Garbage-out) when I took my statistics class in college. If you start with somewhat arbitrary opinions (human polls), it does not matter how much analysis you perform on that data, you still end up with somewhat arbitrary opinions.
If someone created a points system based on NFL draft picks, and awarded points to each college program since the beginning of the draft, I think you would have a fairly good representation of the best teams. It wouldn't be perfect, but no formula would be.