The 2020 Preseason AP Top 25 was released. Here are the topics that matter with the overrated and underrated teams, and which conference got the most respect.
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3. The AP Poll ranked teams that aren’t playing
It’s going to be the year the AP ranked teams that aren’t doing the whole college football thing.
The AP voters got their rankings in before the Big Ten and Pac-12 decided to postpone their respective seasons, but unlike the Coaches Poll that came out before the conferences went dark, the AP didn’t release its top 25 until a few weeks after.
There was time to adjust.
It’s just not that hard to take the rankings as created by the voters and take out the teams that aren’t playing a 2020 fall season. It took me less than ten minutes to come up with the revised rankings.
If teams aren’t actually playing college football, then what’s the point of putting them in a ranking for a season? The Kansas City Chiefs are playing just as much college football in the fall of 2020 as Ohio State and Oregon are.
This was an easy way for the AP Top 25 Poll to shine a light on programs that normally would struggle to get close to the preseason top 25.
Appalachian State and Memphis would’ve been in. How much would it have mattered to a place like Arizona State, or Louisville, or Kentucky to make a preseason top 25 of teams actually playing?
And now what do you do? What, you honored Ohio State by giving it a preseason No. 2 ranking? All that does is mock the fan base with the Christmas present they don’t get to open.
But there’s a reason for all of this …
—@ralphDrussoAP on why the AP preseason poll included teams that have postponed their season: “It was more of: Let’s give people a look at what the preseason would have been, but once the games start, we will only rank the teams that are playing.”
— Paul Finebaum (@finebaum) August 24, 2020
Maybe the AP has this right. Maybe there won’t be a season after all, all the teams will cancel before it all gets going, and the preseason top 25 is a representative snapshot of what the season was supposed to be like.
Just call it an awkward moment in this year when everyone is trying to adjust on the fly.