What do preseason rankings mean anyway?

21 Aug

According to the fine folks at Wikipedia (yeah I know but still come on y’all all know you’re there every other day looking up random facts)

The Associated Press (AP) College Poll provides weekly rankings of the top 25 NCAA teams in one of three Division I college sports: football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball. The rankings are compiled by polling sportswriters across the nation. Each voter provides his own ranking of the top 25 teams, and the individual rankings are then combined to produce the national ranking by giving a team 25 points for a first place vote, 24 for a second place vote, and so on down to 1 point for a twenty-fifth place vote. Ballots of the voting members in the AP Poll are made public

Yay for Wikipedia- the AP has actually done the polls in various forms since 1943 but the current 25 team format began in 1989. There are a ton of polls out there- the Coaches poll (only really accurate in preseason because well coaches do not have time to watch game tape for any team other than their own and the upcoming opponent), USA Today Poll, and a few others like ESPN, SI, etc.

In college football at this moment the polls mean everything because of a pesky thing called the BCS (Bowl Championship Series)

The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) is a selection system that creates five bowl match-ups involving ten of the top ranked teams in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), including an opportunity for the top two to compete in the BCS National Championship Game.

Once again thank you Wikipedia! The BCS began as a way to have a “true” national championship. I put “true” because there is so much debate about the BCS system- especially last year when arguably the two best teams can be debatable because there is no playoff- well not yet a mini playoff begins in the 2014-2015 season. I could go on and on about why this playoff is seriously needed for college football (which FBS division is the ONLY NCAA sanction sport whose national championship is not run by the NCAA).

Preseason rankings give us college football nerds something to talk about, debate, and stand on going into the first game of the year. Typically pollsters will look at the depth chart (how much talent a team has in reserves), returning starters (shows leadership especially in key positions), and what the team did last year. The two polls that are really big are the AP and USA Today.

AP Top 25

1. USC (25)

2. Alabama (17)

3. LSU (16)

4. Oklahoma (1)

5. Oregon

6. Georgia

7. Florida State

8. Michigan (1)

9. South Carolina

10. Arkansas

11. West Virginia