After beating Wake Forest, NC State, No. 15 Georgia Tech, Army,
UMass and Bowling Green, is it fair to say you’re the fourth-ranked
college football team in the country?
Would you even rank yourself in the top five? Really,
doctor?
After beating Wake Forest, NC State, No. 15 Georgia Tech, Army, UMass and Bowling Green, is it fair to say you’re the fourth-ranked college football team in the country?
Would you even rank yourself in the top five? Really, doctor?
I understand how it all pans out in the long run, where Boston College, the No. 4 college football team in the country, starts off at No. 21 and slowly works their way up the polls, capitalizing on easy opponents and other Top 25 losses.
Suddenly, they’re ranked fourth in the nation, and by the looks of the remaining teams on their schedule, there’s nothing you can do about it.
But since Boston College has a somewhat decent history (rival with Notre Dame, Doug Flutie, etc.), they don’t necessarily stand out next to the South Florida’s and the Missouri’s of the world.
Yes, even Missouri is ranked ¬– No. 11 to be exact – after beating truly nobody (Illinois, Ole Miss, W. Michigan and Illinois State) except for No. 25 Nebraska 41-6.
Apparently, to be ranked in the Top 25, all you need nowadays is a pulse and an undefeated record. Pay no attention to who’s on the schedule.
And this is the problem we’ve come to with the college football poll system. With preseason polls and pre-preseason polls and spring camp polls and mid-June polls, the football poll system is saturated, believe it or not.
Each year, at the end of the season, critics complain that college football needs to move to a playoff system. You have undefeated teams like Boise State playing in non-national championship games, leaving everyone to wonder if Florida is any good (since they beat up on an Ohio State team that it turned out had no business playing in the national championship).
Of course, the suits in college football are adamantly against a playoff system because it would make the college game too similar to the professional game, if it wasn’t enough already.
That and the tradition surrounding the Chick-fil-A Bowl, the Meineke Car Care Bowl, the Champs Sports Bowl and the PapaJohns.com Bowl (I didn’t make any of these up) is just too much to surrender.
So if you’re not going to have a playoff system, instead forcing one really good national-championship worthy team (Florida) to play a good team whose worthiness is debatable (Ohio State), start the poll system four weeks into the conference schedule.
By then, pollsters will have a fair understanding of where each team sits, instead of just scanning the Division I list for undefeated teams. I mean, 5-0 Kansas is ranked No. 20 with wins over Central Michigan, Southeast Louisiana, Toledo, Florida International and No. 24 Kansas State.
It’s Kansas, for crying out loud!
With millions of dollars tied to each of these bowl games, the BCS bowl games especially, you’d think more college officials would be outraged by this, as the preseason polls basically set the entire season up without the season ever starting.
Figure USC. They were ranked No. 1 in the polls in the preseason. Essentially, all they needed to do was go undefeated in their season, and they’d be on their way to the national championship game. Simple.
Luckily, they weren’t good enough for the national championship, and fell to Stanford. But let’s say they had beaten Stanford, just barely. Come week four of the conference schedule, with the new polls being released, and with USC just squeaking by Stanford and Washington, would they be ranked in the top two? I doubt it.
If you hold off on the preseason polls and wait until the fourth week of the conference schedule, you’ll have a clearer picture of the best teams in the country.
Instead, we have preseason polls, and give top college football programs absolutely no reason to go against their easy Middle-Tennessee-State-type games in the preseason.
I never thought I’d say this, but thank God for Stanford.
