We are starting a new “weekly” feature today: Saturday Smugness. We still will do NHL Saturday on occasion, when warranted, too, but this day also now provides other forms of “entertainment” in this space. And to kick it off? Our astute observation that the polls and rankings for both college football and college basketball no longer have any meaning, value, or worth in our modern society. Seriously, why even bother?!

First, college football: there is a playoff system now where 12 teams get picked for the championship tournament, and the selection committee doesn’t need or use the polls to select those 12 teams. Automatic bids go to certain conference champions, and the rest of the field is filled out in one of those backroom, smoke-filled situations where TV revenue probably drives most decisions (hello, Notre Dame!). Ho hum.

So, why should anyone “care” about the weekly Associated Press poll or the weekly announcements by the CFP committee itself about preliminary rankings? In reality, no one should, because none of it matters in the end. It’s all just noise designed as clickbait for ignorant fans, really—and it gives the sports mediots something to talk about when filling broadcast/publishing voids. No one will remember this stuff at the end.

Once the 12 teams are selected based on the established criteria, the months of jockeying for position will be rendered moot—and only those 12 teams advance. All the other teams then can lobby for the “best” exhibition games after that, if the “student athletes” even care to play in those. Does anyone care at that point about that rankings once the haves and have nots have been determined, separated, and passed off?

Nope.

Moving on to college basketball, which is a longer season, those rankings mean even less, since the March Madness event has had a long-time, selection-committee process for many more years than college football has had. There are autobids in this sport, too, to the championship tournament, and most of the rest of the bids are decided by formulaic data comprised of various sabermetric measurements that the polls ignore.

There’s little correlation between whatever the Tournament Selection committee is thinking and what the voters in the polls are thinking. In fact, we can say it right now: the AP polls mainly exist to drive readership/viewership now, so it’s all biased and subjective in order to get as much “traffic” as possible. This is why football pollsters ignorantly just put SEC teams into their rankings without rhyme or reason.

Not much is different for basketball, really. And again, once the 68 teams are picked for March Madness, those poll rankings become meaningless as it will be the seedings in the regionals that matter most to fans and pundits. The polls just get published weekly for the same reasons as we noted above: filling the voids in the sports-news cycles. Smart(er) fans focus on the other metrics, not broadly discussed, that really matter.

In the end, as long as fans continue to eat up the slop served to them by the sports media, we’re stuck with polls. Perhaps it keeps food on the table for the AP voters/writers themselves, publishing mindless drivel that has no value or worth. We just keep hoping the fans will smarten up and remember what they learned and already forgot from last season: all the handwringing over polls and rankings is a waste of their time.