(Sorry for the pictures with no captions. Every time they try to modernize something on this site, it becomes more difficult to use.)
You may have noticed the college football season began without a preseason ranking from me. I haven’t been online the whole time, but it’s the first time this has happened since 1995 unless you count one of the “Week 0s” when no one of consequence played.
I really don’t know how to begin to rank teams when I don’t know which teams will be playing at all and when a conference like the SEC will apparently only have inter-conference games during bowl season.
You need some basis for comparison to other conferences. It doesn’t matter how much SEC teams beat each other up and whether one team is dominant or there is a four-way tie at two losses apiece. We won’t have any idea if those four teams or that one team is better than a given team outside of the SEC. We can assume such a team (or group) is better than all FCS teams and all members of the Sun Belt Conference, but we won’t have any legitimate basis to say such a team (or group of teams) as good as the ACC champion or even the ACC runner-up. The best collection of talent could be on a team that won’t even play. There is no point in making a preseason ranking when there is nothing to judge most of it against at the end of the year.
If that doesn’t seem intuitive, I’ll try to explain. In 2018, three of the five SEC teams who finished in the top 12 (LSU, Florida, and Kentucky) had no losses outside of the SEC. Those teams each went 5-3, barely a winning record, in SEC play. #16 Texas A&M would have had the same outcome without a close loss against eventual national champions Clemson (a controversial play that probably decided the game is pictured below). I don’t remember where I ranked those SEC teams in preseason (though I’m sure I didn’t rank LSU very high that year), but if I ranked them in the top 12 or 16, I couldn’t say, “you see, they just barely had a winning record in conference, I was right!” That ranking was only vindicated (or in LSU’s case greatly exceeded) by performance outside of conference by that team and by the teams they played most of the year.
I do plan to publish my computer ratings at some point, but I will make it clear (at least before the final ratings) that conferences like the SEC are basically a closed circuit and their ratings should not be compared to that of other teams. I usually release the first ratings in late September or early October, but with the SEC only starting in late September, the start date will be delayed probably close to one month. If there is a shortened Big Ten schedule, those teams might not be counted until late November.
I may do a preseason SEC-only ranking before the SEC begins, but I have nothing close to my normal enthusiasm for the season and for major sports in general.
I’m still very disappointed there was no conclusion to the college basketball season and that the college baseball season didn’t even make it to conference play. I don’t want to go through getting excited about something that might not happen again. Even if all the scheduled games get played, it makes it hard to get into football when I don’t think there will be any fair way of determining a champion.
Even if there is a consensus top 4 and the outcome is really cut-and-dried, it also makes me wonder how hollow such a championship might be given all the major teams without seasons this year. Ohio St. absolutely deserved that national-championship trophy in 2014, and Alabama (the #1 seed that year) absolutely did not. A number-one seed in all likelihood will be insufficiently tested even if they easily win both games (The top 4 if you take out the Big Ten and Pac-12 champions in 2014 were Alabama, Florida St., Baylor, and TCU, so Alabama may have done just that).
{Pictured: Michael Thomas catches a pass from fellow receiver Evan Spencer to put the Buckeyes within one point at the end of the first half after the Tide had led 21-6. Ohio St. would eventually win the January 1, 2015, semifinal game in the Louisiana Superdome, 42-35, and go on to win the national championship over Oregon, 42-20.}
A #2 or #3 seed would run the risk of not playing a team that finished hot and knocked off the #1 team in the first game. Maybe that #2 or #3 already will have had a loss and would have finished with two losses and not even made it if there were better inter-conference competition. I just don’t see a scenario where there aren’t major question marks around whomever. You can remind me of that if LSU repeats.
The Bayou Blogger 
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Week 1 Review and Rankings
In College Football, General LSU, Post-game, Rankings, Rankings Commentary on September 27, 2020 at 12:15 PMThere have been a couple of major developments since my last blog. Apparently the Big Ten and Pac-12 have decided to play very shortened intra-conference seasons. It might slightly legitimize whichever team ends up as the national champion (provided it’s not from one of those conferences… no matter how dominant it may be, winning 7 or 8 games is no comparison to winning 15), but it really doesn’t help much in ranking teams. There is no objective means to evaluate two teams with a similar record in different conferences without inter-conference play, and many similar teams won’t have similar records anyway if they start the season six weeks apart.
Until those two conferences start play, I will still rank everyone but the SEC on one list and the SEC on another. I’m just going to do a top 10 for the other teams. There are only 12 teams in the AP poll that aren’t in the SEC or in a conference that hasn’t played, so everyone in my top 10 list deserves to be considered a ranked team. There may be one or two left out who’d normally be ranked, but so be it. It can be a challenge filling out the last couple of teams anyway.
SEC
Anyway, you probably noticed I’m an LSU fan, and the Tigers lost for the first time since that unholy abomination of a football game in College Station on November 24, 2018. So that was a pretty good 22 months. If you don’t count that as an LSU loss, I guess you can say it was more like 22 3/5 months, since there was no question about the rightful winner of the LSU-Alabama game on November 3, 2018 (the final was 29-0). For updated records of the LSU-Mississippi St. series (the most-played series in LSU’s history), see here.
In other SEC news, Florida was EXPOSED by Ole Miss when the Rebels scored 35 points and gained 613 yards.
If you couldn’t tell, I’m making fun of everyone (paging Colin Cowherd) who said something similar about the LSU-Ole Miss game last year. Actually, I’m making Florida #2 after the first week. The Fighting Kiffins aren’t pushovers on offense. They weren’t under Rich Rod, so I don’t think that has changed.
The land plankton Ole Miss defense isn’t good, but no one else in the SEC scored 50. Mississippi St. was the only other one who even got to 40, and that was against an LSU team with like negative returning starters if you consider that the Tigers didn’t even have five of the players they expected to have on an already-depleted team a couple of months ago. I’m sure others will do better—there are a lot of smart defensive coaches with a lot more veteran players—but the Pirate (Mike Leach) can be hard to contain even when you have a good veteran defense.
Number 1 may be a surprise. I’m going with Auburn, who beat a ranked (albeit not by me) Kentucky team by 16 and probably would have won by over 20 without a pick-six being called back. Alabama may well beat Auburn easily, but a 19-point win over Missouri (although it was a 32-point lead in the third quarter) isn’t anything to get excited about.
Rankings—SEC only
Until I’m shown otherwise over the course of a full game, I’m going to assume Arkansas is terrible again and that it’s Georgia’s fault the game was close for a while.
I feel similarly about Tennessee-South Carolina. The Gamecocks kept it close until the end at least. I initially had Missouri ahead of South Carolina, but I changed my mind when I saw that 13 of the Tigers’ 19 points came after Alabama already had 35 on the board.
I’m also going to lean toward Florida having a good offense, so I’m not beating up on Ole Miss too much for the points the Rebels gave up.
LSU needed an ugly pick-six just to look like they were close to as good as Mississippi St. and still lost by twice as much as Vanderbilt lost to Texas A&M. I’ll be surprised if Vandy beats the Fighting Tigers, but I think they should be more encouraged by Week 1 than LSU should be.
I still think Kentucky will be a good team even though they looked out of their element against Auburn. Wildcats fans still should not be as pleasantly surprised as Commodore fans. LSU fans are on a completely different level as far as being spoiled, but they honestly shouldn’t be that upset with a team this inexperienced who had no kind of warm-up for the conference schedule.
Others
Top 10 Interconference-Schedule Teams, AP poll equivalent (meaning if the AP disqualified the same teams I’m disqualifying) in parentheses
Clemson has been competing for national championships every year, and I don’t see why they won’t this year.
U. Miami has beaten two credible opponents in conference, as does Pittsburgh, so I don’t see why I ‘d put Notre Dame ahead. The Irish struggled against Duke, and I don’t know why they played South Florida or why they should get much consideration for that game. I also thought Cincinnati’s win over Army by two touchdowns and Central Florida’s two easy wins merited more consideration.
Oklahoma St. and North Carolina haven’t done anything spectacular, but they each won a conference game against a team that might be OK.
Memphis beat Arkansas St., who beat Kansas St., who beat Oklahoma. That’s how desperate I am just to fill out a top 10, but it makes more sense than putting anyone else in that sentence in the top 10.
BYU blew out Navy and Troy. I couldn’t see a better argument for anyone else.
Unlike the major polls, I have no interest in 0-0 teams. It’s really a shame that teams like Cincinnati lost spots in the rankings due to the inclusion of such teams. ULL, which for some reason calls itself Louisiana, went from 19th to unranked after winning. How does that make sense?
Anyway, the only qualifying teams the AP poll has that I don’t have in my list are Oklahoma, which clearly doesn’t deserve a ranking unless it’s for something they did before Christmas, and Texas, which did only slightly better against Texas Tech than Houston Baptist did.