So, now that Week 2 of the college football season is officially underway as of Thursday, let’s go ahead and make this hard, fast declaration.
Preseason rankings need to be eliminated.
I already hear what some of you are saying — “It’s such a unique part of the game. It’s what makes college football so great. It’s all a part of the pageantry of it.”
Bull crap.
At the very least, if you want to keep the rankings, then devalue them. Stop making them be deciding points for a team’s likelihood to win a national title or conference championship. And if you just insist on allowing the rankings to continue determining who plays for a national crown, keep them to yourself until Week 5 or 6. Anything before that is premature and downright silly.
Take a page from high school football — have rankings for pure conversational value alone. Not as a determining factor on who wins it all.
And this is reason No. 10494972957293570292390265 that we need a true, extended, expansive college football playoff system. One that’s large enough to sap the devious, venomous power from the rankings that holds us hostage to them.
Let’s take a look back at the first week of the season, shall we?
Duke dominated a supposedly eighth-ranked Clemson team.
A Colorado team that hasn’t had a good season in, like, 20 years, (ok, I’m exaggerating just a bit) with a new coach and a roster filled with more unknowns than any other in the country, ran past TCU, the supposed 17th-best team in the country and last year’s national runner up.
A Florida State squad that’s still kind of rebuilding dismantled an LSU team that was supposed to be a dark horse national championship contender.
If Week 1 of the college football season has taught us anything, it’s that preseason rankings are pointless and nobody knows how good any of these teams are until the third or fourth week of the season.
All of a sudden, after one game — the only game of the season — we’ve got a top-25 ranked Colorado with some crowning them as a dark horse national title contender because they beat last year’s runner up. The same Colorado that some so-called college football experts said had the worst roster in the country.
Some of those same experts who said Colorado would get rolled by TCU are now saying Colorado is one of the best teams in the country. After one game. Against a TCU team that may end up winning six games this year because the attrition is that severe.
I mean, seriously. How do you take an objective look at the 2023 version of the runner up and not conclude that it’s a shadow of its 2022 self. It was clear to see that this TCU bunch is nothing like last year’s. But we have to pretend that Colorado beat a national power because of the rankings that were based on last season’s success of a team that graduated more than 50% of its talent and had zero opportunity to prove its top-20 ranking before last week.
Make it make sense. You can’t, because it doesn’t.
And before the “hater police” show up, no I’m not taking anything away from Colorado. At all. That was a heckuva win for a team that hasn’t won anything consistently since I was in college. The Buffs have already matched their 2022 win total. What Deion Sanders has done, even with that one win, is remarkable given where the Buffaloes’ football program has been.
And I’m saying that as a Nebraska guy who’s never supposed to have anything positive to say about probably our most hated rival. But truth is truth.
Speaking of truth, the rankings at the top level of college football muck up everything from Heisman Trophy voting to the four-team “playoff” we have at the end of the year. It’s still too close to the days when we called the national championship “mythical,” because it was basically decided by people who vote for the team that tickled their fancy the most, and we pretended that there’s no possible way the best overall college football player in the country could be playing for a team that’s NOT in the national championship picture.
Get rid of them — the rankings, that is. Or at least make them non-essential. Create a playoff system that isn’t dependent upon people in the press box or computer algorithms trying to figure it out alone. Relegate the rankings to good talking points for social media arguments and barbershop discussions.
Honestly, with the way conference realignment is shaping up, I think that’s where we’re headed anyway — two (maybe three) super conferences with a playoff system that makes it more clear who the best college football program in the country is by settling it primarily on the field field.
If and when that day comes, I’ll be the among the first, and loudest, to rejoice. Until that day comes, I’ll keep this soapbox that I’m standing upon right now handy.
Gabriel Stovall is the sports editor of The Augusta Press. He can be reached at Gabriel@theaugustapress.com.
