While it’s akin to taking a leak into a stiff breeze, we have made it known on more than one occasion our utter disdain for preseason polls.
It would make more sense, in our opinion, to wait until at least a month of the season is played before ranking teams, rather than putting out a poll based on last year’s results when every team goes through enough changes via graduation, early NFL entry, dismissals, transfers and injuries to make it border on the absurd to “guess” and slot teams before a single game has been played.
(Then again, the Harris Poll makes its debut after several games have been played and they still basically parrot the Associated Press/USA Today coaches’ poll, so that kind of pokes a tiny hole in our argument. Not that we’ll allow it to stop us from crying about it, of course.)
And, it seems, there are far more important people than us who feel that very same way.
The Associate Press released their preseason poll Saturday, and Georgia Tech was ranked No. 16 by the media after being ranked No. 17 by the coaches. As far as Yellow Jackets head coach Paul Johnson is concerned, the whole lot of ‘em should be done away with until some, ya know, actual games have been played.
“They don’t know. They haven’t seen the teams play. That’s why you don’t ever know,” Johnson said according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “To me, if you really wanted a better indication of the poll you’d wait until you play four weeks and then you’d have it. A lot of it is on returning players.
“It’s like our football team. We lost some guys who were really good players. Some guys think we’ll be OK without them, other guys don’t. So we’ll play the games and find out. Nobody knows who is going to be right until you play the games.”
Of course, preseason polls will never go away regardless of how many people like Johnson bemoan their existence as they are far too popular amongst the media -- how would they be able to overhype early-season match-ups without some number attached to the schools? -- and fans and, unfortunately, common sense is a slowly eroding quality these days. But, hey, we’ll keep bitching and whining and moaning about it; maybe one day people will come to their senses.
Wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen, though.
