A viewer named Will from Princeton, Indiana wrote in with a complaint that's become an annual ritual in this sport: the SEC has seven teams in the top 13 of the latest preseason poll, and it's turning him off from the whole thing. Pate's response wasn't a defense of the SEC. It was a takedown of the accusation itself.

Pate's opening move was pure theater — “Confiscate that dude's shoestrings is the first order of business.” — but the real argument came right behind it, and it's the one worth sitting with.

Here's the context a casual reader needs: the poll in question wasn't the AP poll, and it wasn't produced by anyone who covers the sport for a living. It's the coaches poll, filled out by coaches or their sports information directors — people with whistles around their necks, not microphones in front of them.

The case

Pate's core argument is that Will convicted the poll before he had a shred of proof. As Pate put it: “This is an example of a crime in search of evidence.” Will assumed a conspiracy without checking who actually issued the verdict. The people filling out the coaches poll represent programs and conferences from across the country, and per Pate, “the last thing those guys are looking to do is prop up the SEC.”

Then Pate did the arithmetic. Ohio State and Oregon sit one and two. Georgia is fourth. Notre Dame is fifth, Indiana sixth, Miami seventh. The SEC cluster — Texas A&M, Oklahoma, Ole Miss, Alabama, LSU — lands from eight through thirteen. Every one of those five programs made the playoff a year ago, except LSU, which spent big under Lane Kiffin trying to get there. That's not favoritism. That's a preseason poll doing what a preseason poll is designed to do: reward proven playoff pedigree and loaded rosters over hope.

The teams sitting just behind that SEC group — USC, BYU, Michigan, Penn State — don't have the same recent playoff résumé. Pate's challenge to Will was simple: name the team that got "egregiously" left out in favor of a five-team group that all reached the playoff or spent like they meant to. Nobody has an answer, because there isn't one. “I think what you'll find is that just because you don't like something doesn't make it invalid.”

That's the kicker on the bias argument: a poll reflecting recent playoff results isn't rigged. It's just recent playoff results.

The honest complication

Here's where Pate's own logic cuts against the certainty of the ranking he just defended. He's spent years warning fans not to fall in love with these numbers before a snap has been played. “Marrying them. Marrying your preseason rankings is bad.” The same coaches poll that isn't biased against Will is still built on spring and summer projections — the kind Pate himself has watched blow up on him. He conceded that one bad habit, developed over a long offseason of reading preview magazines, is believing those projections harder than the games that actually decide them: “mistakenly you don't understand that one quarter of football in week one is worth more than months and months and months and months of a hard belief system that you developed over the course of spring and summer.”

So the honest complication isn't that the poll is corrupt. It's that the poll — any preseason poll — is a snapshot of assumptions, not a verdict. Five SEC teams with strong 2024 résumés earned their spots on paper. Whether they hold those spots is a September problem, not an August one.

The close

Pate isn't interested in scrapping preseason polls to satisfy people who want college football to look like every other sport. “It's college football. It's one of one.” He'll defend the exercise every summer, and he'll shout down anyone arguing for conformity: “No. No. You got to shout those people down. No.” But the same guy defending the poll's integrity is the one telling you not to trust it past week one.

Will's version of bias doesn't hold up. His instinct to hold the poll loosely might be the one thing he got right by accident. Watch the segment, then go build your own bias-free 1-through-25 the way Pate dared Will to — and see how close it actually lands to the coaches' version before results start rewriting both of them.