But it’s really not an upset until we find out if a team is good or not

SCOTT JACOBS

It’s the perfect trap for the over-anxious sports fan. Rankings. There’s a reason we jump in a pool of rankings and splish splash all over the place, like pigs in mud. We love rankings. We love debates. And ranking teams promotes debates. So with the pre-season college rankings, we’re really looking at a bunch of hot air. No one’s good until they’ve proven anything. It doesn’t matter if they have a cute little number by their abreviation or not.

It’s the reason that yesterday’s so called “upset” between UCLA and Tennessee wasn’t neccessarily anything. If anything, maybe it was the coming out party for Rick Neuheisel. But, upset? Nah, not after the first week.

It’s too difficult to make anything of the first few weeks of college football. It’s the primary reason teams like USC schedule teams like Ohio State a few weeks into the season, rather than the first week. Sure, a 2 versus a 3 looks awesome on paper, but credence to a ranking is only given after a team actually proves something.

So the fact that number 10 Clemson was blasted by barely unranked Alabama really means nothing right now. Sure, it doesn’t help Tommy Bowden’s case, but besides that, it’s all a bunch of smoke and mirrors. The 10th best team in the land didn’t get lambasted out of the Georgia Dome, a team that was decorated with a 10 by their name did. We don’t know who the top 10 is.

Sure, if you go online, or read a newspaper you can find it, but the first few weeks have teams jockeying for poll position. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. It’s the reason South Carlolina leaped into the top 10 half way through last year, and free-falled the second half, failing to even make a bowl.

Rankings are fun. We all enjoy them. They make college football more entertaining. They get the casual fan’s attention.

But the only thing surprising about East Carolina beating a ranked Virginiga Tech was not that East Carolina beat a ranked team, but that it beat Virginia Tech. We go off of reputations in college sports, so when a relative unknown (East Carolina) takes down a seemingly subpar (but rich in recent history) team it looks huge.

But check back in a few weeks. And then another few weeks.

Ask South Florida. They were number two in the BCS when the first rankings came out last year.

By the end of the year, when Oregon mutilated them in the Sun Bowl it wasn’t an upset. Merely Oregon beating South Florida. But they were number two at one point. It doesn’t matter where you start but how you finish.

College football fans often overlook that.

No one cares if you’re ranked in the top 25 now. For Pete’s sake, Pitt was a top 25 team, before losing to Bowling Green.

It’s what happens at the end of the year.

No one remembers the start. It’s the finish that gets the glory.

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