The Unofficial Top 25

Everyone’s got a pre-season ranking to tout, from the gamblers to the Sporting News to Playboy, there are at least two dozen rankings out there that will tell you which teams are the best and which don’t belong. And amazingly, they can do this before anyone has played a game. This is going to be a little different. I’m not here to tell you who’s good and who stinks. I’m here to tell you what’s good about the game and why nothing beats a college football afternoon (preferably in October). And, I’m here to point out a few things that you need to know about the upcoming season. So, without further delay, here’s my very unofficial Top 25....

(For drama’s sake, we’ll work from the bottom up.)

I realize that I’ve already mentioned this, but the pre-season polls (25) have always baffled me. I was a voter in the Associated Press poll for three seasons and I tried very hard to give an honest assessment of the college football nation. The only problem is that without having seen anyone play, and knowing that 25% of the sport graduates/exhausts their eligibility it’s almost impossible to know for sure which teams are going to be able to maintain/improve. At best, it’s an educated guess, at worst it’s like my golf game – you never know what it’s going to look like.

It’s very similar to the Hesiman Trophy (24) race which – again – despite having no games to watch, has somehow created a list of front-runners. Some will say Pat White of West Virginia, others like Troy Smith of Ohio State, and still more will support Adrian Peterson of Oklahoma. Just like the polls, this skews the end result in the favor of those that got all the publicity before a ball was snapped, and it’s not fair to those players that just might be the best in the college game. Ideally, we wouldn’t have any mention of a poll or a Heisman race until the end of September, but this is obviously not an ideal world.

If it was, the sports overtime system (23) would be different. I know there are those out there that like the way the college game does it, but it’s just too easy to score when you give a team the ball from the 25-yard line. Put the ball at the 40, and at least make them pick up a first down before they can get into field goal range.

Is there a tougher job in college football than the one currently being held down by Ted Roof (22)? Duke football has had exactly one pocket of football success since Viet Nam and once Steve Spurrier and his players left Durham the program has been among the worst in college sports. It’s actually amazing that Ted’s been able to convince some very good players to come to Duke and try to create something out of nothing, but it’s really like trying to climb Mount Everest in flip flops. They do have some good players, however, so try and catch a game at Wallace Wade sometime this year – and don’t laugh. Hey, Florida State and Miami both come to Durham.

Oh, and one more thing, I say it’s time that Darth Visor (Spurrier) stops giving Duke a vote (21) in the pre-season poll. It’s actually more insulting to Duke than anything else at this time because it gets people talking about how foolish it is for the Blue Devils to be in anyone’s top 25, even if it’s just meant as a sort of twisted thank you for giving him a chance to become one of the great college coaches of our era.

At least Ted Roof isn’t on the "hot seat" (20) according to the national media. I write this facetiously because I’m always amazed at the knee-jerk, fire-the-coach element of college sports, but I guess that’s the world in which we live and I’m going to have to come to grips with that element. For the record, unless you’ve proven to be completely incompetent, or you have an athletic department in flux/turmoil, then you’re not on the hot seat. Chuck Amato is NOT on the hot seat. John Bunting is NOT on the hot seat. Larry Coker at Miami is NOT on the hot seat. At least not today.

ESPN is presenting what they call "Full Circle" coverage of Monday night’s Florida State-Miami game. They did this in February for the Duke-North Carolina basketball game at Cameron Indoor Stadium and it was about a B-minus on my grading scale. The idea is that there’s the normal coverage on ESPN, they had above-the-rim cam on ESPN2 (I guess in this case they’ll have an end zone view), and on ESPN U – which I know most of you don’t have – they’ll have crowd cam. The only problem with the last element is that it was just a camera focused on the crowd with no view of the game. Why would anyone want to watch that? Unless, this game was at Florida State (it’s not, the game is in Miami) and we could have the camera trained on Jenn Sterger (19) all night long.

Speaking or the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in sports, I’d have a lot more respect for the job they do if they’d just stop trying to create the news and just report it. They did something within SportsCenter recently that made me angry. They actually had two of their college analysts predict the outcome of the entire season, and then broke down their own, 10-team National Championship Tournament. They called this the ESPN Championship Series (18). Of course the sport doesn’t have a playoff, yet ESPN, knowing that so many fans want one, made one up and treated it as a news item. The place for that is within a college football preview show, not a time when we could be seeing in-depth highlights of the latest Red Sox loss to the Yankees.

And, for the record, I love the BCS (17). It does exactly what it was designed to do, it gives us two teams to play for the national championship. It might not give us the two best teams, but no matter what sport you follow, the chances are that the two best teams don’t make it all the way to the title game/series. The two teams that are playing best at the time will be, but that sort of diminishes the importance of the regular season, doesn’t it? Either way, the sport benefits from the conversation and the fact that each week is vital to the process. Plus, the games are on Fox this year, so it’s all good.

One of my favorite things to talk about is the number of post season college football bowls that dot the landscape from the middle of December through New Year’s Day. This year, we have four new bowls (16) to watch – or ignore – including a fifth BCS game which will conveniently air on Fox 50. On top of that, one of last year’s bowl games, the bowl in Houston, went out of business and will be replaced by a new game in Houston. If I didn’t tell you that, you might think you were watching the same old bowl in Houston, but now you know that it’s brand spanking new.

For the record, the games will be in Albequerque, New Mexico, Birmingham, Alabama and Toronto, Ontario.

Conference USA will be a part of the game in Birmingham, so East Carolina might end up spending part of the Holiday season in the deep south as long as Skip Holtz’ team can negotiate a non-conference schedule (15) that features four teams that went to bowl games last year. The Pirates will start the season on the road at Navy and end it in Raleigh against NC State. And, in between they’ll host Virginia and take on national title contender West Virginia in Charlotte. In future years, Virginia Tech and North Carolina will appear on ECU’s non-league slate and it makes you wonder if Athletics Director Terry Holland likes his head football coach.

There is no better nuts and bolts web site for college football (and basketball, for that matter) than collegeBCS.com (14). Note; I'm not getting paid for this mention, it's just a great site devoted to college football. You'll enjoy it.

As many of you know, this year is the first season of the permanent 12-game schedules in college football. The hierarchy in the sport got together and decided that there was room for a 12th game each season even though it would eliminate the bye week for many schools throughout the country, and the idea was that it would create really good non-conference opportunities for attractive TV match ups.

It didn’t work out that way. Almost every school chose to schedule an automatic win with those extra games because home dates equal big bucks. The one conference that chose to do something right was the Pac 10 Conference (13-4) who took that extra game and chose to play a 9-game conference season. Now every team in the Pac-10 will play every team in a true round robin format, just like they used to in the ACC – remember the good old days? On top of that, some of the conference schools will still play a strong out of conference schedule. Southern Cal has a road game at Arkansas along with home dates against Nebraska and Notre Dame. And Oregon also scheduled up, hosting highly ranked Oklahoma on September 16.

Of course, you’ll have to deal with the Ducks’ 2006 uniforms (3) should you choose to watch.

No matter how hard the ACC tries to catch up to the SEC in football it’s never going to happen. There are a lot of reasons why this is the case, but like ACC basketball, it’s all about the rivalries (2) in the league. The ACC has only 1 or 2 real rivalry games but the SEC has about a dozen. Whether it’s the Iron Bowl, the Egg Bowl, the Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party, or Georgia and Auburn between the hedges, the SEC has a game that fans have been beating each other up over for decades.

However, I will give ACC Commissioner John Swofford (1) credit for a major improvement in ACC football. Since the conference expanded, the commissioner has increased the bowl tie-ins from 6 to 8 and with the recent re-allignment of those bowls, he’s also jumped the guaranteed payout from $22.75 to $26.85 million dollars. The league is now competing with the SEC and the Big Ten for supremacy in the bowl payout department, though it still falls short of the top two football leagues in America.

Now, if he can just figure out a way to get out of the commitment in Boise, and find a more desirable, exotic locale for the last bowl game. Doesn’t St. Lucia need a Bowl?

We’ll talk next week, when games have actually been played.

Adam