The Associated Press released their pre-season poll this morning, an event which marks pretty much the final ritual before we start heading into the 2011 college football season proper. Now before we all begin disparaging the particular ranking and discussing how flawed polls are in general, lets take a look at what it says about Alabama and the SEC.
There aren't a lot of surprises here. Alabama and Oklahoma are considered the two teams to beat with Oregon and LSU sitting right outside that lofty perch. The Southeastern Conference is expected to be a right beast this season with the SEC West being the "group of death" to borrow the soccer parlance. A record eight SEC squads made the AP rankings with no less than five from the west division.
Here is the AP rankings side-by-side with the pre-season USA Today Coaches Poll that was released August 4. While the AP poll has a certain gravitas given its longevity, the Coaches Poll is more important of the two ranking as it counts for one third of the BCS formula. The other poll that is used to determine which teams will play in the four BCS bowl games is the Harris Poll which does not release a pre-season ranking. SEC teams are shown in bold and first place votes in parentheses.
|
So, in a nutshell, Alabama faces a total of five foes ranked in the AP poll and no less than six teams in the Coaches Poll. Among the top ten teams in both polls, only LSU faces a rougher slate. It's times like this I really hate perceptive and insightful analysis driven by statistics rather than gut instinct.
|
Auburn, as noted by Cecil Hurt, will face every other SEC team ranked in the AP poll. So good luck with that. In any case, these are just the two most prominent pre-season polls. After the jump we've collected a few more of the Top 25 lists that have cropped up this off-season.
Now aside from the official polls there are the prognostications of the sports media mavens ESPN, SI and Rivals that come immediately prior to the season. The ESPN.com Power Rankings, the Rivals rankings and the SI rankings have the benefit of coming after a good deal of the off-season has been concluded. Here are their tallies of the Top 25 teams in the land.
The ESPN.com Power Rankings are selected by 25 of the WWL's print, online and broadcast staffers. The Sports Illustrated and Rivals pre-season poll is draw up by in-house writers as well. Since these media outlets pretty much dominate the process of providing information college football audience, their opinion of which teams are the best carries a lot of weight.
|
Like the regular polls, Alabama and LSU are represented up at the very top. The all include South Carolina, Arkansas but vary pretty widely on how good they think each will be. Rivals breaks with convention by being somewhat down on Mississippi State.
More interestingly Sports Illustrated has Auburn and Florida clawing in at the very bottom of their list but omits Georgia entirely (projecting a 3rd place finish for the Bulldogs in the SEC East). ESPN takes the opposite take, omitting the Tigers and the Gators and slotting Georgia at No. 20. Rivals omitted all three.
Lastly, we have the Top 25 rankings from the various season preview magazines. For the most part, these were done sometime after spring training and so don't reflect the injuries, suspension and general chaos that some programs have endured over the past four months. Still, they offer an interesting yardstick as to what preconceptions continue to hold about the season to come.
|