Preseason Rankings: Keep the Poll, Admit the Miss, Stop Six-Month Scorekeeping
Preseason rankings belong in college football. The problem starts when people treat a June prediction like a contract and drag it into December after the games have erased it.
Preseason rankings should exist. They should be flexible, fun, and disposable once the games give us better information. The damage doesn't come from ranking Penn State, LSU, or Clemson too high in August. It comes from marrying yourself to the pick and then letting people weaponize it six months later.
I understand the argument against the poll. Adam Wittenberg's concern is that preseason rankings can create damaging narratives and look foolish by October. That concern is fair. The answer, though, isn't abolishing the rankings. The answer is admitting that nobody knows anything and starting from there.
The poll is a forecast, not a contract
Last year gave us the clean example. I liked Clemson and Penn State before the season because both had continuity at quarterback and plenty of players we knew, liked, and trusted. The wheels fell off early for both teams. That made the prediction wrong. It didn't make the act of predicting irresponsible.
The before was reasonable information. The trigger was the season itself. Once the games showed us something different, the rankings had to move. That's the whole deal. If a preseason ranking survives unchanged after the evidence changes, the failure isn't the poll. It's the person refusing to update it.
The issue is not the rankings. The issue is not even people looking stupid. The issue is looking stupid by marrying yourself to your rankings.
I can own my misses. I had Penn State, LSU, and Clemson high last year. I had Lagway first in my preseason SEC quarterback rankings. I had Jackson Arnold seventh. Regrettably, yes. I was wrong on some of those calls. That isn't a sporting emergency. That's the entry fee for putting a prediction on the record before the answers arrive.
Games erase bad August stories
By the time the playoff rankings came out last year, Penn State, Clemson, and LSU had already been flushed out of those preseason spots. Indiana had moved into a premium position. The games did the editing for us.
That matters because the preseason poll doesn't control the playoff rankings committee. It doesn't get to overrule the scoreboard. Its value is somewhere else: it gives fans something to debate while the sport is still waiting on real answers. If we don't make predictions, what did summer even show up for?
I don't want preseason rankings to matter to the playoff committee. I do want them to matter to me as a fan. Those aren't competing ideas. One is about selection. The other is about having a reason to watch the first Saturday with a position already on the line.
The bad habit is keeping score backward
The real problem is casuals waiting until December or January, seeing how the season played out, then using an August prediction as ammunition. A person who had Clemson, LSU, and Penn State unranked in the preseason can criticize my misses after the fact, but that doesn't make the person right in August. A Fernando Mendoza Heisman ticket from last year would've required the same courage before the season. Most people didn't have one.
That standard gets worse when friends use it on friends. Will Compton took issue with my preseason Big Ten quarterback rankings because I didn't have Anthony Kandria in the top 10. He then brought my SEC rankings from last year into the argument. Fine. I made wrong predictions. I also made them before the season, which is the point.
I respect the people who want less noise. I respect the people who want the poll gone. But the sport doesn't need fewer predictions. It needs fewer people pretending the old predictions still matter after the games have replaced them.
The test comes in October: when a preseason favorite falls apart, watch whether the ranking moves or whether somebody keeps defending August. Preseason rankings belong because they give us a forecast. They become damaging only when we refuse to let the games erase them.
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Articles are drafted from Josh Pate's College Football Show under the site's editorial standards and monitored by the editorial team — corrections are timestamped, never silent.