BYU will finish the season 13th this year. How
do I know? Well, I saw a truck drive by yesterday with the license
plate BYU 413. And obviously BYU won't finish 4th, so I'm sure they're
destined for 13th. License plates never lie.
The above example is completely ridiculous. But it is my contention,
that it is hardly much more ridiculous than all of the preseason polls
and prognostications released by the sundry sports magazines, websites,
and ranking organizations. These polls and rankings are predicated on
random guesses, unreliable inferences, and whimsy camouflaged as
deductive logic.
To highlight how useless preseason prognostication is one only need
look at the last several years of college football. Ohio State started
out two seasons ago ranked outside the top 10 by most sources and went
on to topple the ‘Miami Hurricanes in the Fiesta Bowl. When Miami ran
the table the year before, they began around number 10 in most polls.
Oklahoma's run at the title a few years back saw them fully out of the
vast majority of all preseason Top 25s. So if the bulk of publications
are that far off that they couldn't even pick the National Champion
within their top ten (or 25 in the case of OU), why the hell is anyone
still buying their publication? |
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