If you flipped through Tuesday’s sports section, you saw the college football top-25 polls from each of our four columnists.
If you read mine, you already know it better than I do.
I mailed it in. By that, I mean I told our esteemed editor, Anthony Chiang, to do it for me (he’ll be writing my papers and letting me steal his lunch this semester too).
As much as I like making Chiang do things for me, I would rather have abstained.
I’m not qualified to rank the best 25 teams in the nation. Odds are, you aren’t either, nor are most of the media members in the Associated Press poll.
There are too many teams, too many players and too many question marks about all of them to make accurate predictions on a wide scale. Beyond that, no teams have played a down of football yet, so it’s all based on hype and who is supposed to be good.
I know one team well enough to make a guess about how its season will go: Florida.
And even with UF, I’m hardly an expert.
Sure, I spend large parts of my day talking and writing about the Gators, but I’ve yet to see them so much as run a sprint because fall practices are closed to the media.
So how can I know how good they are until they play?
It’s all speculation, and that’s all preseason polls are.
That makes for some interesting debate — a large part of the entertainment factor of sports — but here’s where it turns from me being a buzzkill to a real problem.
In college football, polls actually matter.
Unlike an NFL power poll, college rankings affect who gets to play for the national championship. The USA Today coaches’ poll, Harris poll and computer rankings all play a part in the BCS formula.
Coaches don’t have nearly enough time to watch every team around the country (not to mention they have their own agendas), computers can’t watch football games, and I’ve heard enough press-box chatter during the last three years to know that media votes are often made without much research.
In politics, we have a law mandating that candidates have the opportunity for equal airtime on radio and television. That doesn’t exist in college football.
While the AP poll doesn’t have a direct effect on the BCS and the Harris poll doesn’t kick in until a few weeks into the season, preseason rankings do affect how we judge a team’s performance as the year wears on.
I don’t want to turn this into another column begging for a playoff (seriously though, please?) but I hate that the sport’s champion is partially decided by votes rather than on the field.
A day before the AP poll came out (with UF at No. 4), a reporter asked Florida defensive end Justin Trattou what he thought the rankings would be.
“That means absolutely nothing because we’re still going to go out and play the season,” he said.
I agree completely. I just wish the polls were still meaningless after the season has played out.
