AP top 25: Some things simply never change

Last Saturday, I made the mistake of going grocery shopping. My mistake wasn’t actually buying groceries - my fridge and pantry were quite bare - my mistake was going during tax free weekend. The place was packed with family doing all types of back to school shopping, making sure little Johnny and Emily had their handy dandy notebooks and three ring binders. This morning as I drove to work, I made a secondary mistake by not accounting for all the added school buses, commuting college students and carpooling parents dropping kids off at school, which definitely made me late for work. With tax free weekend, kids going back to school, and this year’s season of Big Brother coming to an end, we all know this can only mean one thing. No, not that summer is coming to an end, it more importantly means football season is finally back and with that it’s time to look at people who constantly make mistakes and that’s AP voters.

Preseason polls have virtually stayed the same recently. Every year we can bank on certain things to remain the same.

• Alabama will be atop the ranking. The fighting Nick Sabans have been among the top three in every AP preseason ranking since 2010.
• Notre Dame will be overrated. Since 2011, only twice have the Fighting Irish finished higher than their preseason ranking and both times they were unranked to start the season. Maybe if they were unranked to begin every year Notre Dame would indeed be great again.
• Texas Tech gets no love. Tech has not been ranked in a preseason poll since 2008 despite five seasons in which the team made an appearance.

As Thomas Jefferson once put it, “ We hold these truths to be self-evident.” I can assuredly tell you he either wrote this into the declaration of independence or was speaking about the AP voters tendency to follow the same line of thinking every year. However with that being said, none of these preseason polls truly matter, what really matters is the product each team puts on the field every week. Sure enough this poll will look very different in December and different from week to week as the season progresses. I am just ecstatic that we finally made it to game week and as another great scholar, Bart Scott, once put it, I simply “can’t wait.”

1. Alabama
2. Clemson
3. Georgia
4. Wisconsin
5. Ohio State
6. Washington
7. Oklahoma
8. Miami (FL)
9. Auburn
10. Penn State
11. Michigan State
12. Notre Dame
13. Stanford
14. Michigan
15. USC
16. TCU
17. West Virginia
18. Mississippi State
19. Florida State
20. Virginia Tech
21. UCF
22. Boise State
23. Texas
24. Oregon
25. LSU