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On NCAA Preseason Rankings

So the NCAA football preseason rankings came out this week. USC is number one, followed by LSU. And more than likely, only a loss can change those rankings.

Preseason rankings in college football are about as pointless as it would be to rank NFL teams before the season. If they were just novelty, and didn’t have a direct impact on the outcome of the national championship and BCS game matchups, then I wouldn’t care. But I do care that the media and coaches decisions in August about how good they think Boston College will be, will directly impact where they finish at the end of the season. I’m using B.C. as an example, but you could plug in any team you want to this scenario.

About the only real reason the college football season is even played is to make money. The schools, the conferences and the NCAA all make money on football. The distribution of that money is largely dependent on the team’s success, particularly what bowl they go to. Getting into a BCS game is like hitting the lottery for the team that makes it there, as well as the conference that that team plays in.

Last year’s BCS teams each took home around $15 million to share with their conference. The next highest payout was $5,312,000 to Wisconsin and Arkansas for playing in the Capital One Bowl. Still, 17 of the 32 bowl games payed out less than $1 million to each team. That sounds like a decent chunk of change still, but when you factor in sharing it with the conference and expenses to actually make the trip to the game, most teams in the lower-tier bowl games barely break even, or even lose money.

Being ranked two or three spots higher in the first preseason bowl, may be the difference between playing in the Fiesta Bowl and taking home up to $17 million and playing in the MPC Computers Bowl and taking home $750,000. That’s what happened to Boise St. last season. They benefited from getting a few votes in last season’s preseason poll and parlayed their undefeated season to a BCS game, something no past mid-major team had accomplished.

While Boise started last season unranked, they went through their schedule undefeated and earned a BCS bid. They were receiving votes last season, enough that they were able to climb into the top 25 at 3-0. They were able to get a BCS bid for the first time, but being undefeated, were unable to do much more than scratch at the door of playing in the title game. Boise St. ended the season ranked 8th in the BCS poll, and 9th in the USA Today and Harris polls. Had they started the season ranked in the top 25, could they have earned a spot in the title game? Doubtful, but you can see the point I’m making. If Boise were in a major conference, and all other things were equal, it’s possible that they end up playing for the title, because they may have gotten a more favorable preseason ranking.

My point of the Boise story is that no one knew in the preseason just how good that team was. Teams in the mid-major conferences especially, take the brunt of unfavorable preseason rankings. That team may have been penalized because nobody expected them to be so good. Had they been ranked just a spot or two lower in the first bowl, they may have been screwed out of getting into the Fiesta Bowl, and ended up hosting the MPC Computers Bowl once again.

The way the ranking system works in college football is quite obvious. Voters rank their teams in the preseason, then alter the rankings each week based on that week’s results. That means usually teams that win move up, and teams that lose move down. This system has so many flaws that I can’t even begin to cover them. There are two obvious flaws to ranking this way that I will talk about.

First, the week in which you lose ends up being far more important than the circumstances of the loss or to whom you lose. If you’re LSU this year, you could lose one game all year, and depending on when your loss is, you could end up ranked in a variety of spots. You could lose your week two game against Virginia Tech, and likely still be ranked number one or two at the end of the season after winning the SEC title game. You could lose your week six game against Florida and get shut out of the SEC title game and ranked around number five. Or you could go 12-0 in the regular season and lose the SEC title game, knocking you out of the National Championship game. Losing early does not really hurt most teams, but losing late in the year can effectively end you National Championship hopes.

On a similar note, that same LSU team could get upset in their opening game by Mississippi State, and they would probably fall to about 10th in the rankings. Winning out would likely put them back in the top two. But if in this same scenario, that LSU team beats Florida en route to going 11-1, they would be ranked ahead of Florida, who could also go 11-1, but lose to a much better team.

This brings me to the other major flaw with today’s ranking system. When so many teams have played against each other, how do you sort out all of the head-to-heads. If LSU beats Florida, Florida beats Florida State, Florida State beats Miami, Miami beats Virginia Tech, and Virginia Tech beats LSU, how do you rank all of these teams? This is obviously an extreme example, but it shows the argument I’m trying to make. In the previous scenario, I had LSU and Florida both going 11-1, with LSU losing to a 3-win team, and Florida losing to a 1-loss team. In any other situation, Florida would be ranked higher. But how can you justify ranking them ahead of a team they lost to? It is such a subjective way to rank teams that it inevitably leads to controversy.

I like my share of controversy, but I like it in the form of “who’s better, Daisuke Matsuzaka or Eric Bedard?” I like controversy where it doesn’t really matter who’s right, it’s just fun to debate. College football is a way of life for far too many people to let the season be determined the way that it is.

So why have preseason rankings? That’s simple. To sell magazines, get traffic to web sites, and have a way to hype up otherwise meaningless early season games. But in all of this, it’s not the teams ranked in the top ten that suffer, it’s the teams just barely receiving votes, or not getting any at all.

The only real solution is the one we’ve all heard over and over: a playoff. The logistics are tough, but it is possible. I have created a format that I think answers all of the questions and it is in it’s final revision stage before being unleashed. Check back soon for updates. But in the meantime, we’re stuck with bowls, and what bowl you play in is nearly as important to a football program as who your starting quarterback is.

There is a fine line in bowl season between breaking even and striking gold, and which side of that line a team falls on is unfortunately often decided in August.

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