Rank

College Football Revolves around rankings. Every major sport has rankings them in one form or another, but only in Division 1 college football do they actually make a substantive difference in championship and bowl game match ups. While my hatred for the whole ranking system, and its corrosive monopoly on the psyche of college football, is well documented, I concede that rankings are still an important part of our (flawed) system.

Nevertheless, I am perpetually perturbed by the inanity and logical inconsistencies of the ratings culture. For example, while watching a game recently, the announcers were discussing the upcoming Alabama-Georgia game that night. They quickly reached agreement that Georgia coach Mark Richt should motivate his players by telling them that "they deserve to be #1". The Bulldogs entered the game ranked as "only" # 3, a horrible travesty which needed to be corrected. I'm not sure if Coach Richt included this in his pregame speech, but whatever he said didn't really take. The Bulldogs were down 31-0 at the half to the Tide and ended up losing 41-30 at home. In the new poll today they are #11.

The point of all this is simple: stop whining about ratings. You were "only" # 3, a mere 4 weeks into the season? Tough. Win your games, take care of your business, and I promise you at the end of the year you'll get your just rewards. (Note: promise does not apply to Auburn). Your team being #1 now means nothing. It may sound nice, it may make you feel good, but its worth bupkis.

Extending this train of thought, we hear a lot about conference strength and strength of schedule arguments based on rankings. "The SEC has 5 teams in the top 10!" "So and So team beat the #N and #Y teams!". The problem with these kind of appeals is simple: after those 5 top 10 teams finally play each other, some will lose (in fact, the probably all will lose), and then will fall, so they will no longer be ranked so high! Of course, losing team X will still get to say that they only lost to highly ranked team W, so their ranking won't suffer too much. Similarly, Team W will rise in the rankings, because they beat still fairly highly ranked team X. Its all very zen.

Similarly, after you beat a team, they no longer have the ranking they previously had. So how should we compare these types of wins (and losses)? If you played a team ranked # n, and beat them, and then they fall and keep falling, did you really beat # n? If a team you played suddenly starts to rise in the rankings long after you played them, does your fate link to theirs? Good luck finding a straight answer from most fans.

Another thing that bothers me is the unspoken rule that losses much automatically drop teams in the rankings. Granted, most of the time it makes sense: if you lose, you probably weren't as good as your ranking suggests. Maybe. Most of the time. But consider the following example from this week as it relates to this norm:

Penn State, ranked # 12, hosted Illinois, ranked # 22, on Saturday night. Penn State is having a great year, blowing out every team they played so far. The Fighting Zooks put up a good fight against a hostile environment but ultimately fell 38-24, the final margin widened by some late scoring as the Nittany Lions put the game away. As a result of their success, Penn State rocketed up the rankings to # 5. Illinois, because of their loss, fell out of the top 25.

To me, this seems logically inconsistent. If Penn State really is a top 5 team (and I think they are), then why should Illinois be punished for losing a relatively competitive game on the road against them? Considering they have two losses, both to current top 5 teams, isn't it logical that they could still be worthy of the #22 ranking they had? Isn't it also possible that the #22 team could lose this kind of game to the #5 team. On the flip side, if the Zooks really don't deserve to be ranked, then why should Penn State be pushed up so far for the win?

The answer, of course, is easy: the polls are done but hundreds of busy, under informed voters who basically take a look up and down the sports pages on Sunday morning, make a note of who won and who lost, and "re-position" teams according to the lazy standard of "win goes up, loss goes down".

I'm certain that I'm tilting at windmills here with my plea for rankings sanity, a unified theory of ranking if you will. I only hope that, since we are tied down to this craziness for the foreseeable future, maybe we can inch towards a more coherent system of thinking about and ranking teams. Let's do it for Auburn. Think of the tigers.