Around this time every year college football junkies begin to get the fix. With just over two months until the season kicks off, sports magazines will hit the shelves to predict the goings-on for the upcoming season. I am as big of a college football fan as anyone, but I hate preseason magazines. Actually, I should clarify my statement. I hate preseason rankings in preseason magazines.

I understand why the magazines and web sites have the rankings. Web site hits and magazine sales are driven by people picking up Phil Steele’s latest prognostications and dissecting the schedules and what not. But what happens is that teams that are rated highly are at a distinct advantage, even before they have played a single game. Now, before you send your angry emails that argue the preseason rankings don’t matter, let me stop you. Yes, the coach’s poll and Harris poll come out a few weeks into the season, but they come out too early so the big teams have usually not played good opponents (notice the plural). So what happens? The polls look just like all of the preseason magazine polls. I would bet most of the voters who comprise the Harris Interactive Poll just look at magazine rankings and copy and paste them onto their initial ballots assuming the teams have yet to lose a game. Teams that are undefeated get to stay in their slot even though the voters do not take into account that some teams have played poorly, yet remain undefeated. Other teams could have lost a tough opening game – say VT losing to Alabama the first week this year – but still be more deserving of a top-15 spot over an undefeated Notre Dame squad who beat up on Syracuse. Hell, Boomer Esiason is a voter. That’s right, the guy who should be watching NFL tape so he can break down game film for CBS’s NFL coverage is supposed to take 15 hours every Saturday – the day before he is supposed to be on camera for CBS – and make an informed ranking and have it to the poll collectors by 1:00 p.m. Sunday. Only in college football would this idea get approved.

I understand that the preseason magazines aren’t going anywhere. Print journalism is dying as we speak, so to ask them to stop printing the one thing that sells is not an option. What the NCAA needs to do is force the coach’s poll and the Harris Poll to hold their initial ranking until the seventh or eighth week of the season, not the fourth or fifth. Until teams have played 6-7 games you really don’t know who is good and who is not. Most teams play three soft non-conference opponents, so the first 3-4 weeks are mostly glorified scrimmages. Having rankings based on Texas playing Wyoming or Florida playing Troy is a waste of time. Sure, USC and Alabama play a top team early, but it is not like people will forget how the teams looked in those games. Have teams play 2-3 conference opponents before voters judge them. By the sixth or seventh game, people should know who the best 20 teams are. Having them determine that after two or three games doesn’t make sense.

Preseason rankings matter. Auburn lost a shot a title because they were rated so low at the start of the 2004 season. Had voters waited until week eight, they would have seen that Auburn was legit. This year Notre Dame could be the inverse of the 2004 Auburn team. Notre Dame is going to be ranked this year in the preseason (Phil Steele inexplicably has them at 7). The Irish play a super-soft schedule, with USC being the only lock to be ranked. So if they wind up at 9-3, there is a very good chance that they will be in the top 15, which means that they will be oh-so-close to a guaranteed spot in the BCS. If Georgia Tech, for example, had the same record, or even 10-2, they would have a much tougher time getting into the top 15 because they will start out so much lower, and this is what needs to be avoided. Voters are historically stubborn when it comes to dropping teams when they win. This needs to stop. Voters need to have the guts to drop a team for playing poorly and beating inferior opponents by less than they should. There also needs to be a quality win component in the BCS, like it once had. The quality win component ensured that teams would be rewarded for beating stiff competition. Had college football had this aspect last year, Texas would have avoided the shaft and fans might have been dealt a better title game (though that is highly doubtful). As it stands now, the Texas Tech’s of the world are rewarded for playing patsies. Before Texas Tech was pounded by Oklahoma, they were ranked in the top two in the nation. Their non-conference slate was Eastern Washington, @ Nevada, SMU and Umass. Voters have to stop rewarding teams for playing schedules like that. Notre Dame dropped a number of teams because they knew it was detrimental. If I were an AD I would schedule cream puff after cream puff because if you run the table, you’re going to be in the big game. And that is all that matters.

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