If Mark Richt ran college football…
The shockwaves are still being felt from last weekend after five of the nation’s top 10 teams suffered defeats. The rash of stunning upsets has prompted some curious journalists to wonder why they occurred.
Georgia coach Mark Richt has a theory: The media and his colleagues are partly responsible. He believes the ranking system is not accurate in the early part of the season and that some of the teams that lost had been overhyped.
“I think we rank teams too soon,” Richt said Wednesday during the SEC coaches teleconference. “I think that’s part of the issue. You’ve got to rank somebody top 10, top 15, top 25. If somebody loses and they’re a top 10 team you can’t keep them there. So somebody else rolls up there.”
Should the polls be abolished, then? Richt won’t go that far, but he did propose a solution.
“I think if we would wait until after Game 6 to rank everybody there would be less upsets of top 10 teams,” Richt said. “We would all have a better feel of who should be in there.”
Right now, Mississippi State coach Sylvester Croom said the pollsters have exhibited a tendency to favor programs that have been traditionally strong and that bias skews the rankings in the first month of the season.
“I think the media has not caught on to the fact that there is a high level of parity in college football,” he said. “What I am saying is that the traditional powers — college football is not what it was 10, 15 years ago.
“We still associate good football with the traditional powers of 15, 20 years ago. That’s not the case anymore. Everybody can beat anybody.”
After Oklahoma, West Virginia, Texas, Florida and Rutgers all lost to lower-ranked opponents last Saturday, Croom seems to be speaking the truth.
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