The College Football Machine Has Sprung A Leak

And no...I'm not talking about the BCS. We can leave that piece of crap for another day. There is something else wrong with college football that has a direct effect on how crappy the BCS is...and that is the preseason rankings.

A preseason ranking can make or break a team's season, simply based on how high or low they are ranked before a game is even played. Top 10? Top 25? Out of the top 25? How do we know any of this before we have even seen a team step foot on the field?

Here are the preseason rankings from this season (We'll use the AP Poll as the example):

1. Florida
2. Texas
3. Oklahoma
4. USC
5. Alabama
6. Ohio State
7.Virginia Tech
8. Ole Miss
9. Penn State
10. Oklahoma State
11. LSU
12. California
13. Georgia
14. Boise State
15. Georgia Tech
16. Oregon
17. TCU
18. Florida State
19. Utah
20. BYU
21. North Carolina
22. Iowa
23. Notre Dame
24. Nebraska
25. Kansas

So there you have the preseason top 25. It isn't so much that I don't think that certain teams are deserving of more "benefit of the doubt" if you will, it's just that the teams shouldn't be ranked before a game has been played. Here is how things have played out since then, and this is where the problem comes in.

• Iowa squeaked out a win in week 1 against Northern Iowa...fell out of the top 25 (WIN and fall out?). As a result they are now 4-0 and ranked behind (in 1 of 2 polls) a 3-1 Penn State team that they just beat in Happy Valley.

• Oklahoma loses to BYU, the current #20 team in the nation (without their star QB, we all know the sob-story) and they barely fall out of the top 10. BYU later goes on to get pummeled by an unranked Florida State team. Now Oklahoma is back into the top 10 and poised to make a run at the title if they win out.

• USC loses to an unranked Washington Huskies team, who the following week goes and gets waxed by Stanford. But since USC destroyed Washington State (which they should) they climb back to #7 in the nation, and also poised to make a run should they win out.

• TCU and Cincinnati look great, have both beaten quality opponents both inside and outside their respective conferences, but because they play in a "weaker" conference they didn't get the preseason ranking that perhaps they deserved.
  

The only teams that are up there and appear to be deserving of their spots are Virginia Tech (big win over Miami this past week), Texas, and Alabama. We'll see shortly when Florida has to play LSU if either team is really deserving of the early hype.


So I am proposing this. No rankings until week 3 at the earliest. Who cares if your team is #11 or #16 after week 2. If you win your games it doesn't matter who they beat that early. That would give pollsters enough time to base the rankings on the level of talent that teams have already beaten.

Here is an example (take a breather if need be): If team A beats team B (a "quality" opponent) in week 1, and then team B goes on to start 0-3 and loses to teams that are considered to be weaker opponents, were they really that good? Now if team B had received a high preseason ranking, it could have catapulted team A into a high spot in the rankings, without pollsters even knowing if they deserved it or not.

Those are my thoughts...take it or leave it.

~Golf Czar