In the preseason college football rankings last year, how many top-25 teams stayed top-25 teams by year's end? Fifteen. In the last four years, how many teams have fallen from preseason top-25 grace to unranked squads clamoring for minor end-of-the-year games like the Meineke Car Care Bowl?
Forty-one. In the last four years, the AP Top 25 has successfully predicted only 59% of the teams that will end up ranked by year's end.
And how many teams have finished the same ranking as they started? Two: 25th-ranked TCU in 2003 and first-ranked USC in 2004.
The excuses flow like wine: it's a hard job, almost impossible. It's a crystal-ball business. You get it right and you've done your job. You get it wrong and you're the pinnacle of incompetence. It's the equivalent of being an offensive lineman.
How about instead of making all of these excuses we just, oh, I don't know, do away with the whole concept of preseason rankings? They're completely meaningless and only serve to make teams look better than they ever are. The proof is in the pudding all around us.
The fourth-ranked Texas Longhorns just barely squeaked by unranked Arkansas State 21-13 and the fifth-ranked Michigan Wolverines have already suffered an embarrassing (completely embarrassing) defeat at the hands of Appalachian State. There's something wrong with a crystal-ball business where the fourth-best team in the nation beats Arkansas State by only eight and the fifth-best loses to a Division-II ball club.
Unranked East Carolina held ninth-ranked Virginia Tech to 33 yards rushing. And if not for a fourth-quarter collapse by unranked Kansas State, the 18th-ranked Auburn Tigers would have left their Jordan-Hare Stadium losers.
The purpose of the rankings is to provide a framework from Week 1 to guide the top two teams in the nation to the National Championship Game. The only problem is the rankings heavily favor teams at the top of the list and early-season losses.
USC could lose their first game and slide down to sixth or seventh. They beat the rest of their teams and the voters forget about their little stumbling block against the Anytown McNobodys. Then you have a Louisville or a Boise State that continually starts off at the bottom of the ranks and claws their way to a one-loss season and finishes their climb at sixth or seventh.
And therein lies the central problem: a large part of the ranking process is voted upon. In a perfect world, there'd be a simpler ranking formula to calculate the top-16 (or, God-willing, 32) teams and stage a playoff schedule like EVERY OTHER SPORT AND COLLEGE DIVISION CLASS IN FOOTBALL.
If it is to be completely objective and fair, a computer formula needs to be agreed upon and relied on solely. If it is to be completely subjective with leeway given every year to teams that we feel deserve the right to play or a game that would prove more entertaining, a voting formula needs to be agreed upon and relied on solely.
For either scenario, the rankings don't need to start until Week 4 or Week 5 because there are too many variables to account for. For one, the player turnover is too large. A team is 20-25% new players from the last snap of the previous season to the kickoff of the next. And when a team loses its three-year starter at quarterback or a key offensive lineman of four years or a sack-machine decided to go pro early, the team will fall farther than expected.
If the Cleveland Browns and Oakland Raiders are given a fresh start at the beginning of every year, we can certainly let the TCU's and Missouri's have theirs.
September 3, 2007
OldBrave:
ASU came to play Texas and the Orange didn’t beat them…they beat themselves. ASU outplayed Texas in every aspect of the game and was in the red zone 5 times..failing to score twice. Texas was stopped dead in their tracts when they got to the red zone time after time. Leonard, ASU’s QB, looked like he should be playing for Texas rather than McCoy.