Why College Football Rankings Are Rank

The talking heads that surround college football have had a field day with all the upsets that have occurred in the first month of the season.  BYU over Oklahoma. Houston over Oklahoma State.  Washington over USC.  Iowa over Penn State.  South Carolina over Ole Miss. 

But how are we basing these as upsets?  Does anyone really know this early in the season how good Oklahoma State or Ole Miss is supposed to be?

They are being called upsets because the almighty polls determine them to be so.

This early in the season, the polls are basically based on how a team did last year and the laundry the team wears.  It's a total guess with such a small sample size. 

Jeff Sagarin, the noted mathematician that came up with the Sagarin Ratings that are part of the computer rating soup that is part of the Bowl Championship Series rankings, notes that there is not enough data at this point for truly objective ratings.  If you look at his ratings today, Sagarin notes that the ratings are "bayesian" and the starting ratings he used still have weight in the process.  Only when all teams are connected do the ratings become unbiased.

If Jeff Sagarin can't come up with objective ratings this early in the season, how can the rest of the world?  Do the coaches (and by coaches, I mean college Sports Information Directors who actually fill out the things) and the media have omnipresent insight?  Hardly.

Most pollsters don't objectively look at how each team did that week.  The usual protocol is to keep the same order as last week, except you bump teams that lost down about 10 spots.  Everyone in college football acknowledges that it's better to lose early in the season to give you more time to climb back up the polls. 

If you didn't start the year in the polls, you have little chance to get to No. 1.  South Florida, who is currently 4-0 after beating Florida State last week, is still unranked.  Even if the Bulls go undefeated, they have to jump over several one-loss teams like Virginia Tech and Oregon to get to the top spot.

This all wouldn't matter if the polls were harmless fodder for debate between passionate fans, like in college basketball and pretty much every other college sport.  But in the wonderful world of big-time college football, the USA Today Coaches Poll and the Harris Interactive Poll make up two-thirds of the formula that determines who plays for the BCS championship, the de facto national championship game.

Imagine if the NCAA basketball championship selection committee made their selections in December, then just adjusted the seedings based on who wins and loses over the rest of the season.  Wouldn't that generate a lot of debate and outrage?

Of course, that's what the leaders of big-time college football want.

So while holding off on ranking college football teams until after the completion of week six makes so much sense logically, it will never happen.