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By Eric Horchy | The Suncoast News

Published: August 2, 2008

And off we go, folks!

Whether you realize it or not, the race for college football's BCS National Championship officially began this past Friday.

To this you may ask: "But how can this be?" A game has yet to be played, not a ball has been snapped and pre-game kegs remain all untapped. But don't be fooled, my friend. The mad dash is, indeed, underway.

Rationally, this makes no sense whatsoever. Period.

How a race can possibly begin before the starting gun sounds is absolutely ludicrous. But then we all collectively recall that this is, in fact, Division I-A college football we're talking about, and the presumed need for logical thought processes is whisked away.

Believe it or not, the reasoning behind this absurdity even predates the bemoaned – to put it lightly – Bowl Championship Series. It's also one of the chief sources behind the Series' imperfection as a whole.

It's the preseason Top 25 polls. The horribly arbitrary rankings compiled by both the Associated Press and the USA Today coaches poll that can eventually show their effects on postseason berths months down the road.

Sure, lots of people love to analyze and make predictions, but leave it at that. Forecasting future outcomes months in advance is something you do while drinking with your buddies, not publish nationwide to handicap programs for better or for worse. Let the new batch of guys hit the field at least a couple times to show what they've got before drawing comparisons. No team is ever identical from one year to the next, so to conclude anything at all is mere speculation at best.

Heck, even the BCS waits until Week 5 to release their computer printout. But then again, the two human polls play a major role in what the BCS spits out; therefore it's inherently tainted by the preseason faux pas.

To quickly play devil's advocate to myself, the USA Today poll has indeed correctly placed eight teams in the championship game in the past six years. Eight out of 12 is not too shabby.

Taking a closer look (barely) will show a different story.

• In that same time span, the voters were only 53.3 percent accurate on Top 10 teams by year's end. (32/60)
• By Week 3, if they could wait, that accuracy already goes up to 61.7 percent. (37/60)
• In two of those six years, 2002 and 2004, voters only named four Top 10 teams correctly.
• In the past four years, a team ranked as high as the preseason No. 3 fell out of the Top 10. A team as high as No. 6 has been out of the Top 10 in all of those six years.
• In 2005, three Top 10 teams (No. 3 Tennessee, No. 4 Michigan and No. 10 Iowa) were not even rated in the Top 25 after the bowl season. No. 5 Oklahoma barely hung on, finishing No. 22.
• In 2002, the voters whiffed on six Top 10 predictions. Picks numbers 4-9 each dropped a minimum of 15 spots, with none reaching higher than the final polls' No. 21 slot. Three of the teams were absent from the final Top 25.
• Also, in 2002, the eventual national champion, Ohio State, was omitted from the preseason Top 10, entering the season at No. 12.
• And finally, in 2004, Auburn was the preseason No. 18. They finished that year 13-0 and No. 2 in the nation, passed over for a BCS title game bid in favor of Oklahoma and USC. All three finished the regular season undefeated. Since USC and Oklahoma were given a cozy preseason head start as Nos. 1 and 2, respectively, the Auburn football team essentially had about as good a chance of getting into the NCAA basketball championship game as they did of getting past either of those two.

Granted that numbers can be, admittedly, easy to skew, it still remains hard to deny the stupidity behind giving legitimate weight to a bunch of guys' ability to guess before a down has been played.

Referring back to the last two preseason flubs listed above, imagine if the names "Ohio State" and "Auburn" were replaced with "UTEP" or "Kent. St." Mid-major teams never start much higher than No. 15 and the level of perfection those programs have to attain to even sniff the BCS, let alone the title game, is astounding.

Blend into the discussion the bias that inherently comes along with any human poll – coaches, media, levels of coverage, etc. – and this column quickly shifts from column to dissertation.

That is for another day.

But amongst the disharmony, you do, in a way, have to give it up to those captaining the ship here. The preseason poll issue may be another matter of controversy swirling amid the sea of confusion and frustration that is the college poll system, but hey, at least they're consistent.

Eric Horchy can be reached at 727-815-1071 or ehorchy@suncoastnews.com

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