{"id":246715,"date":"2025-10-23T18:32:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T18:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/246715\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T18:32:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T18:32:08","slug":"kirk-herbstreit-defends-having-preseason-rankings-in-college-football","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/246715\/","title":{"rendered":"Kirk Herbstreit defends having preseason rankings in college football"},"content":{"rendered":"

In recent years, many have complained about the importance placed on preseason rankings in college football. For example, Texas<\/a> and Penn State<\/a> opened this season at No. 1 and No. 2 in the polls. As we head into Week 9 of the season, the Longhorns sit at No. 22 while Penn State is unranked, lost four games in a row and fired its head coach.<\/p>\n

During Thursday\u2019s edition of \u2018The Pat McAfee Show<\/a>\u2018, Kirk Herbstreit defended preseason rankings. The dual-threat commentator\/College GameDay panelist believes the rankings are good for preseason hype, but don\u2019t hold any true impact once the games kick-off.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a fan of preseason rankings,\u201d Herbstreit said. \u201cI\u2019m a Reds fan. Baseball season is typically over for me usually well before the Fourth of July, so I\u2019m jonesing for some news and stuff to talk about. If the AP Poll comes out the second or third week in August and gets us excited about college football, I personally have no problem with it. I have the ability to look at a preseason poll and after five weeks of football, I don\u2019t even know what happened in the preseason. I don\u2019t give a sh*t about the preseason.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of the 10 teams ranked in the preseason top-10 rankings, just five teams (Ohio State<\/a>, Alabama<\/a>, Georgia<\/a>, Oregon<\/a> and Miami<\/a>) remain. Indiana<\/a>, which opened the season at No. 20, now sits at No. 2 in the country. Penn State (No. 2) and Clemson<\/a> (No. 4) opened the season inside the top-five and are both now unranked.<\/p>\n

Herbstreit uses Penn State and BYU as examples of change in polls<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m watching football right now. I watch every single week and I have opinions that change,\u201d Herbstreit continued. \u201cThat\u2019s the team I thought they were\u2019 or \u2018they\u2019re not the team I thought they were\u2019. Penn State is an example of that, or a team like BYU<\/a>. They lose their quarterback in the middle of camp and they have to find a freshman, Bear Bachmeier<\/a>, who no one knew what he could do. All of a sudden, it\u2019s like \u2018wow look at BYU!\u2019 Am I gonna hold onto my preseason thoughts on week one rankings of BYU? No, no of course not. I\u2019m looking at BYU kicking ass and taking names and looking at what they\u2019ve done over the past couple of weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s a lot of people having nothing else to talk about, so they talk about how unfair preseason polls are. I don\u2019t have any issue with them at all. I think we all adjust accordingly to actually watching football. The teams that are overrated sink in the rankings or they pop out. And I don\u2019t think the committee gets caught up in preseason rankings at all, especially in November after eight or nine weeks of football.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end of the day, preseason ranks are for nothing but discussion and popping big ratings early in the college football season. Since 2000, just two preseason No. 1 teams have gone on to win the National Championship (USC<\/a> in 2004 and Alabama<\/a> in 2017).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In recent years, many have complained about the importance placed on preseason rankings in college football. For example,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":246716,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[399,398,396,397,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-246715","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-ncaa","10":"tag-ncaa-football","11":"tag-ncaafootball","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}