The AP’s Preseason Top 10 Has Entered Its Excuses Phase – Week 2 of Zero Based CFB Rankings

If you are just seeing our rankings for the first time, you would probably benefit from reading last week’s post here.

I would like to congratulate the college football experts on another outstanding season of knowing exactly how good everybody is before anybody plays football. Several of their August masterpieces have already reached the part of the season where the warranty department stops answering the phone.

Through Saturday, October 17, four members of the AP preseason Top 10 have at least two losses. Two have three. Together, those four teams are 15-10.

Apparently, 40 percent of the preseason Top 10 came with assembly required.

Here are the receipts:

The August rankings are preserved in the preseason poll.

Oregon entered the season ranked second and received 14 first-place votes. Fourteen people looked at a team that had played zero games and decided everybody else should stand behind it. The Ducks are now 4-2, even after beating Nebraska on Saturday. I’m sure the August paperwork looked magnificent.

Texas started fifth. The Longhorns have now lost consecutive games to Oklahoma and Florida, which is a creative way to handle the burden of expectations. Getting beaten by one unranked team could be an accident but following it with another suggests somebody was way off in how they evaluate teams.

Then there is Texas A&M, our preseason No. 8. The Aggies are 4-3, and that fourth victory arrived Saturday against FCS opponent The Citadel. Nothing settles a dispute about your national championship credentials quite like scheduling a meeting with the Southern Conference.

Oklahoma opened at No. 10 and is now 3-3 after losing to Kentucky. The Sooners have managed to lose half their games while retaining a perfectly good copy of their August resume. They should frame it. Those things apparently appreciate in value when somebody else needs to claim a quality win.

Oklahoma did beat Texas, of course. Texas beat Ohio State. Follow that chain for a while and you can practically hear somebody explaining that Oklahoma is the best 3-3 team in America. We ought to put that on a commemorative plate.

Six teams from the original Top 10 have held up considerably better. Miami is unbeaten. Ohio State, Georgia, Notre Dame, Indiana, and Ole Miss each have one loss and their accomplishments deserve to be evaluated on their own merits. I have plenty of material without pretending a single loss means a football program needs to sell the stadium for parts.

The problem is the head start we hand out before the evidence exists. A team gets a fancy number in August, somebody beats it in September, and the number becomes part of the sales pitch. By October, we’re still discussing the purchase price while the transmission is lying in the road.

This is why I have been saying for somewhere between 25 and 35 years that preseason rankings are stupid. Let everybody start equal. Let them play through Week 6. Then evaluate what they have actually done.

We already know how to wait for results in other areas of life. Nobody gives the county spelling bee trophy to a kid because his daddy could spell and his new shoes look fast. College football has somehow built an entire August industry around that level of analysis.

If Texas A&M turns things around, its later results can establish that. If Oklahoma starts beating strong teams, give the Sooners the credit they earn. We can update an evaluation when the evidence changes without pretending we needed an authoritative national pecking order before Labor Day.

And before anyone points to JMU as an outlier, JMU’s weak schedule reduces the credit its wins earn, and its FCS victory receives half credit. But seven wins (when the most any other team has is six) with no loss penalties still produce a high rating. Every opponent’s results feed back through the calculation each week, so that position will likely change considerably. So I expect stronger resumes to push JMU outside the top spots by season’s end. We are not handing out championships in week 7, but even if we did JMU would not get it. So let the season play out and until then, take another sip of whatever helped ease the pain of your favorite team’s loss.

That is what I’m testing with my Zero-Based Rankings, using AI to do the arithmetic and follow the connections between teams’ results. Earlier wins can gain or lose value as the season develops. Cupcake wins receive reduced credit. The same rules apply to everybody, and the preseason poll contributes nothing.

Our current No. 1 is 6-0 UCLA, which beat Oregon. The Bruins had to play their way into that position. Oregon got its No. 2 before taking the field.

I’m sure next August we’ll be assured that this time the experts have really studied the rosters.

I look forward to receiving calls about trying to sell me the extended warranty.