Ranking the College AP Poll: Why Florida Should Not Be No. 1

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There's a revolution going on among sharp critics of the AP ranking system for college football, and it bears out some interesting results.

More and more observers of college football are ranking teams not by what they did last year, or by how powerful they "might be," but rather by who they've actually beaten. This means looking at their "résumé" to determine where they rank.

Doesn't this make sense? Who cares how many starters Florida returns if all they've done so far is inflict blowout wins over Charleston Southern and Troy? Same goes for Texas versus Louisiana-Monroe and Wyoming. Two weeks have gone by.

Good football teams in the SEC, the Mountain West, and the Big Ten have scored great victories, and their names are not Florida, Texas, or Penn State.

The No. 1 team in the country should be the team who has beaten the best teams, and not by way of a fluke. Until that team loses, they should be sitting atop the AP poll.

Florida's résumé right now is completely illegitimate. They've beaten nobody teams, at home, while other teams have been tested, sometimes on the road, en route to their wins.

I understand that at least in the preseason, the AP rankings give college football a structure. Numbers allow viewers to understand how good a team ought to be, while rankers are just trying to project what the final list will look like. That's fine to do for the preseason, before there's anything real to talk about.

But once week one is over, there's no legitimacy in keeping these numbers around. Rankings have been earned by actual effort.

Critics of the résumé ranking system might say that this makes rankings too volatile, too week-to-week. The No. 1 team in the country might not actually be good or might not be able to sustain their momentum.

The same could be said, however, of teams that are ranked by how they did the previous year or how good they ought to be. The current ranking system factors in number of returning starters, but how about coaching changes, shifts in philosophy, little things that a poll can't address?

After all, good units lose their coordinators to coaching vacancies and therefore lose their identities. No matter how many starters they retain, their production is almost guaranteed to suffer.

Look at LSU's defense once Bo Pelini left. That unit dropped from the 18th-best overall in 2007 with Pelini as DC in the national championship year to barely above the middle of the pack in 2008. It's currently hovering around 70th in the country.

What if the same thing happened to Florida's offense with the departure of offensive coordinator Dan Mullen to Mississippi State? You wouldn't know it by these blowouts, but that level of production will seriously be tested in a future SEC game.

In addition, ranking teams solely by their résumés won't mean trading off the thrill of the upset. Upsets are, at least in the current era, what generate the majority of viewership, even if they're supposed to flatten the hopes and dreams of whomever is on the losing squad.

It would be great for NCAA viewership if the ranking systems were as volatile or more volatile than the current system, since if a viewer believes he or she is watching history being made, he or she is more than likely to want to continue watching, no matter who's playing.

Finally, emphasizing big games means teams will have more incentive to schedule them. This means less Penn State-Akrons and more USC-Ohio States. Most athletic directors everywhere think of this type of scheduling as suicide, but if it's the only way your team garners respect, it has to be done—and no avid watcher of college football can object to that.

So, should Alabama should leap Florida as the strongest team in the SEC after their win over a solid Virginia Tech team? Should USC be at the top after beating a good Ohio State team in the Shoe? I think so.

I also think Miami and Georgia Tech should be in the top 10, along with BYU, Cincinnati, Houston, Cal, LSU, Baylor, and Michigan.

Oklahoma State should be just outside the top 10. They have the best win by a Big 12 conference team so far with their victory over Georgia, despite their loss to Houston, who may be more talented than we now know.

When it's Florida/Texas in the mythical national championship game in January (and here's hoping it's not; let me go on record saying Alabama will get the revenge game in the SEC championship, if Florida makes it that far), this will all seem irrelevant.

Until then, college football rankings should be a system wherein respect is earned, not given away. Résumé ranking retains all the ratings-generating and upset-watching aspects of the current AP system without doling out any unnecessary respect. Learn it, use it, love it.

Or maybe I'm just tired of watching highlights of Tim Tebow.

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