Question: Do you think UNC dropped further in the polls this week because of suspensions?
Better question: Should it matter?
Yes and no. My guess is that voters took the suspensions into account when determining how “good”* they think UNC is. But they shouldn’t. Imagine if a great team went 12-0, won their conference championship, and then–God forbid–there was a terrible catastrophe right after game that decimated their roster. They should still play for the championship, yet some voters would move them down in the polls because they are no longer one of the “best” teams in the league.
*I put “good” and “best” in quotes because they are subjective terms in college football, yet somehow they because calcified in the minds of voters. Texas is good. USC is not as good as last year. Washington St is bad. Those terms don’t really mean much at this point because they are guesses. We’ve only seen one game.
In any debate or decision-making process, it’s important to consider the following: what is the question? Here are a variety of questions a voter might ask when deciding which team to put at 2 and which team to put at 3:
- Which team is better?
- Which team would beat the other team on a neutral field?
- Which team deserves it more?
- Which team has proven itself?
Look at every other major sport and you’ll find that these questions are irrelevant when determining which teams make the postseason. There are only two questions that matter: how many times have you won and who have you beaten?* In all other sports, only win-loss records matter, and if two teams have the same record, we look at who they have beaten (conference/division/head-to-head records). We don’t care about who we think they’re going to beat, or by how many points a team wins, because that gets away from the point of a competition. It’s fun to prognosticate, it’s fun to run up the score, but only one thing matters. Take it away, Herm:
*Okay, technically soccer cares about goal differential. They also have ties. Just watch the video.
Wins matter. Who you beat matters. So while other people have teams like Florida and Nebraska in their top 10, I have them at 32 and 65, respectively, because they haven’t beaten anyone of consequence yet. Now of course, this argument is somewhat self-destructive after Week 1 because I am using subjective rankings to determine strength of schedule. How do we know that Miami of Ohio is not the second-best team in the country behind Florida? So here’s where I’ll admit that I’m cheating just a little. I use preseason strength of schedule, but only in the first few weeks. Otherwise I’d have 65 teams in first place. My system will stop considering preseason rankings in October because I’ll remove it as a component, but I don’t believe that voters can just forget about it. Anyway, here are my ratings after week 1:
