This past weekend we concluded Week 1 of the College Football season and there was some interesting games. For instance Florida State was preseason ranked #10 since then they have lost to Georgia Tech and at home to Boston College. Oregon who was ranked #6 overall and was 47 point favorites over Idaho beat them 24-14 at home. Clemson ranked #14 played Georgia and lost 34-3 while I will give them credit for at least losing to a power house in Georgia but are you telling me the difference between the top team and the 14th team is 31 points? I don’t think so.
Here is the issue with preseason rankings, well now teams like Georgia Tech and Boston College will have “top 10” wins because of preseason rankings. In addition you have 9 teams in the top 25 from the SEC which basically guarantees they will always be ranked because of preseason rankings. Most of these teams will finish outside of the top 25. This will eventually effect the College Football Playoffs rankings and even with 12 teams making it this year some teams resumes will look better because of wins against top 25 preseason rankings.
So how do we fix the issue of terrible rankings to start the season, Well there has been a lot of suggestions I believe though that this might be the best way to figure this out. So the first thing that needs to happen is we need to do away with the “preseason rankings” There is no way we can know which teams are better than which without seeing them play or by basing it off of Recruiting classes. So what we can do is either have preseason games against these cupcakes that teams usually schedule in the first week. For instance, Oregon would play Idaho in the preseason instead of week 1. Then we can do the rankings after the preseason games. If this doesn’t work then we can wait 2 weeks and rank the teams after they have played 2 games this will avoid teams like FSU being ranked #10 and starting the season 0-2. I believe this is the best way to solve the issue of “overrated” preseason ranked teams.
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