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Maicke: Time to end preseason college rankings
▶ MIKE MAICKE
@MJ_Maicke
W What a wild weekend of upsets in college football.
No. 5 LSU lost to the unranked Wisconsin Badgers, No.10 Notre Dame fell to unranked Texas, and the No.3 Oklahoma Sooners fell to the No.15 Houston Cougars.
But are these games really upsets? Technically, yes, when an unranked team beats a ranked team it is an upset. But who decides that a certain team is the third-, fifth- or 10th-best team, without seeing the players take the field for an official game?
I'll be blunt about it; pre-season rankings need to go.
The first thing that comes to mind is how grossly inaccurate they are year after year. Sure these analysts typically can get the No.1 or 2 team right for at least a few weeks, but in the playoff era,
Associated Press LSU's Jamal Adams fails to intercept a pass during the first half of an NCAA college football game against Wisconsin Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016, in Green Bay, Wis.
Just ask Ohio State.
being the third- or fourthranked team is just as important as claiming the top spot.
The counter to my preseason rankings gripe is a simple one, "Stop complaining. Mike! The best teams will rise to the proper ranking by the end of the year anyway." Sure, that is typically how it works out, but people that fall back on that statement are missing the big point of why these preseason rankings are so destructive.
The only problem is that LSU isn't a top-five opponent. In fact, they aren't even
Teams are consistently getting unfair resume boosts from week one games against grossly overrated teams. Let's look at Wisconsin for a second. A win against a top-five opponent in LSU at a neutral venue (but, come on, Green Bay isn't that neutral) looks absolutely fantastic on a team's postseason resume.
close right now, seeing as the Tigers dropped all the way to the No. 21 spot. So did Wisconsin beat the fifth-ranked team or the 21st-ranked team?
LSU's No. 5 ranking had absolutely no merit to it beside a few people proclaiming the Tigers as a top team despite these same people not seeing a minute of them on the field in 2016.
Associated Press
Further compounding this problem is the fact that wins in September are seemingly valued the same as wins in November. A football team in week one is drastically different than the team that will take the field in rivalry week, so let's please start weighing wins and losses differently.
Not all wins are created equal.
Preseason rankings have one true intention, to boost television ratings by creating seemingly a matchup between two top teams such as the third-ranked Sooners
against the 15th-ranked Cougars. That's promo gold.
And now, thanks to those little unwarranted numbers in front of the schools' names, the game becomes must-see TV for the lemming sports audience that takes those rankings as the be-all
and end-all.
It's not fair for teams like Wisconsin to get its "victory of the year" against a team that was simply misjudged by analysts.
Stop giving undeserving teams undeserving post-season resume boosts. Stop
trying to hype up a matchup with rankings which are blatantly off.
So please, stop ranking teams in the preseason.
Big 12 Rankings for Week
1. TCU 1-0
2. Baylor 1-0
6. West Virginia 1-0
3. Texas 1-0
7. Oklahoma 0-1
4. Oklahoma State 1-0
8. Kansas 1-0
5. Texas Tech 1-0
9. Kansas State 0-1
10. Iowa State 0-1
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