Further Proof that College Polls are a Sham
As if we needed more.

Every week, the coaches in D-1 football programs (D-1 being the largest, D-3 the smallest in four-year colleges) get together and mail in votes as to who they think the number one college football programs in the country are.

Well, in theory.

In actuality, it's the D-1 athletic directors who get together and mail in votes to the Associated Press and USA Today newspaper. The coaches just sign their names to it, or, even worse, just have the AD rubber-stamp a signature on the votes.

That's bad enough, and of course it's worse that the top 30 teams in the land don't have their votes discounted - of COURSE they're going to vote for themselves week after week, skewing the system. But that's not the real problem.

There's a preseason AP poll which comes out, and rarely means anything except to the programs themselves, because nobody who hasn't yet seen the teams play in game situations really knows how well they're going to fare losing a quarter of their players to graduation. Really, it's just a way for gamblers to find out who the coaches think is going to run the table - in week one.

The real problem is when the polls come out - the post-week one poll was released today at around 2 PM.

SIX TEAMS IN THE TOP 25 HADN'T PLAYED A GAME YET.

SIX.

And yet these teams were still ranked within the AP Top 25. One of them was number four (Florida State) and one was number five (Miami of Florida).

Does this bother anyone else? This would be like declaring that John Kerry won Missouri on November 1st, as far as I'm concerned.

This shouldn't surprise me, though, since it's really nothing new. The Heisman Trophy is awarded to the best football player in the nation every year (really, the best glory boy QB, RB, or WR, which is a shame since Heisman himself was a lineman), with votes being cast by living Heisman recipients and a theoretically select group of sportswriters every year.

Now, one would think that to be judged the best player in the nation, one would have to finish one's season, right? I mean, the Golden Globes judge best movie after it's released instead of in postproduction.

But that's not the way it works in college football - not in a sport where 10% of the votes for the Heisman Trophy come in BEFORE THE PLAYERS PLAY THEIR LAST GAME. Jason White won the Heisman before he finished his season - in his last game, he looked like a high school freshman lining up against the 2000 Ravens defense in a 35-7 loss to Kansas State.

It's not that I've lost faith in college polls, because I never really had any; I'm just surprised so many people still do.