The Coaches Poll is out! One of the more ridiculous practices in all of college football (and that's saying something), these rankings are determined by a group of people with clear biases, public grievances, the inability to watch every game in full and legitimate reasons to vote with their heart and not with their heads. Furthermore, if the head coach of my football team had the free time to honestly assess every other college football program on a weekly basis, he much be a horrible head coach (hmmm...is Greg involved in this?). Seriously, I don't know how college football does it but their mission to determine a champion "as unscientifically as possible" is downright commendable in its stupidity. Anyway, here we are and this year Georgia is your preseason #1. They beat out #2 USC by 8 points, who in turn beat out #3 Ohio State by 8 points. Oklahoma and Florida round out the top five while defending champion LSU gets courtesy-ranked at #6. All six of those teams received first-place votes, showing how wide open the season is at the moment.
The Big East gets two placements in the poll, West Virginia at #8 (that's gonna be too high) and South Florida at #21 (that's gonna be too low). Rutgers, Pittsburgh, Cincy, UConn and Louisville all received votes as well, leaving Syracuse as the only Big East team not mentioned. Fech.
See now if we lived in a smart world, this poll would remain unchanged until about Week 3 or 4 when everyone has had a chance to play a couple games and we've separated the pretenders from the pack and identified the surprises. Then, we could re-calibrate the polls to reflect reality rather than biased opinion and conjecture. Alas, we don't live in a smart world...