NCAAF Rankings-Too Early!

What’s in a ranking?

College football off to a fun beginning

 The smell of football is in the air with the first major weekend of College football.  The smell of fresh cut grass, the days getting shorter and the boys of fall taking the field across the country to decide a Champion.  Of course, the smell of pompous sportswriters and clueless T.V. and Radio analysts also fills the air as they try and tell you with authority who the best team in the country is.   The truth is we have absolutely no idea who is the best but to help us, year after year they trot out these pre-season rankings because one team has signed a bunch of four star recruits and another team has nine returning starters.  Saturday night Alabama took Louisville to the woodshed and dropped 50 points on them.  Excellent display and clearly the ‘Bama machine look oiled and primed again.   But was it a huge win or just a thumping of a school that could be (4-9) this year?     Many of these schools are over estimated and huge wins in September that catapult a team in the rankings look silly by November when that “5th ranked team” you beat has 5 losses and isn’t ranked anymore.

Notre Dame beat Michigan also Saturday night in a game of supposedly 12^th and 14^th ranked powers based solely on recruits who never played, returning starters and Jim Harbaugh’s ability to take his whole team on trips to Rome to meet Pope Frankie. One of the reasons Michigan was ranked so high is that they were returning nine starters on defense from last year which is amazing for a team that lost five times last year.  This is like a NY Knick fan getting excited because they are returning four starters from last year’s 20 win team.  This defense gave up 42 points last year to Penn State, which is not exactly known for prolific offense the past 100 years or so.  PSU went into yesterday ranked #11 and needed a last-minute OT score to beat legendary football giant Appalachian State. App. State is famously known for once beating Michigan and being the site were the movie “Deliverance” was filmed.  To their credit App. State had PSU squealing like a pig late into the game.

Although I am an admitted Notre Dame fan, I have no idea how good they will be.  ND hasn’t had a good defense in decades and early on they were shutting down Michigan and I was encouraged, until I realized that Michigan has a poor QB and running backs so weak they could barely make an old lady with a life alert necklace miss a tackle.   But at this point it doesn’t matter because Michigan was #14 and in the eyes of those doing the ranking, it’s a huge opening day win that will catapult ND into the Top Ten, maybe even the top 5.   That is the problem with the ranking system because once you get vaulted up the board, it’s very hard to fall unless you lose a game and even if you do, it’s a minimal drop.   Auburn, ranked 9^th, beat 6^th ranked Washington and will surely sky rocket this week in the polls as will Oklahoma which shellacked my son’s school Florida Atlantic University.  Rumor is Oklahoma only took this game because “Peter, Paul and Mary University of the Musical Arts” was forced to cancel so they could puff the magic dragon on a field trip to a cannabis farm.

The truth of the matter is, at year’s end many of these games and wins will look much less impressive than today. However, the BCS committee will still not look at the fact that beating “6th ranked Washington” on September 1^st was just a win against what could be an unranked four-loss team by November.  I have long advocated for the first poll to be conducted on October 1^st each year because it will discourage games against lower level schools this week for fear that you may not be ranked as highly and may have to fight your way up the rankings all season because you started the season playing Furman, SW Louisiana State and Stevie Wonder’s School for the Blind for your first three games.

-BSB