College Football Polls: Are Preseason Rankings Necessary?
Over the years, preseason rankings have proved to be inaccurate and cause controversy rather than bring order to the national rankings. The big part of the preseason rankings seemed to be based on their performance from the previous season, which has absolutely nothing to do with the current season. There are other factors that are taken into consideration, the amount of graduating seniors and underclassmen that declare for the NFL draft. But these factors don’t seem to play as an important role in developing the rankings compared to what was done the previous season. Every season brings a new team with new chemistry and new question marks at marquee positions. Rankings should be released when we can see how the teams are going to perform on the field, and when we have a body of work that can be quantitatively compared among the Division I football teams. Just to give a few examples, Kansas was not even ranked in the top 50 of the coaches poll and Missouri was ranked 31. Both of these
