Georgia football deserved to get that No.1 overall ranking after the Dawgs beatdown Samford, but at the same time, it also proves just how irrelevant the early season polls are.
The Dawgs are the defending national champions, and before the season started, polls placed them at No.3 overall. That ranking wouldn’t happen if it were Alabama.
Media experts predicted the Dawgs would have a falloff and struggle against Oregon and a few other programs. Georgia would not be the same because of the 15 players it lost to the NFL.
Guess what? Those people were wrong. Two weeks into the season, and the Dawgs are once again the No.1 team in the country. The funniest part is head coach Kirby Smart, and his team doesn’t even care.
Georgia football exposes irrelevant early season polls.
If Georgia’s two-week rise to the top proves anything, these polls are meaningless. Look at Texas A&M and Notre Dame — neither should have been in the top 10. Waiting until Week 5 or 6 before publishing a poll would be better than what is currently going on and has gone on for years.
Will it change? No, but the way Smart discussed it in his Monday press conference tells us everything.
"“It’s never a big deal. It only matters at the end of the year. I mean, I don’t know that we’ve spent many weeks outside of the top 10. And it never mattered whether we were inside the top 10 or outside of the top 10. It just is irrelevant,” Smart said in his Monday press conference. “I mean, it’s a lot more— a lot more worried about how we execute a combo block than I am worried about what we’re ranked. And hopefully, the kids are the same way.”"
Smart said it himself — it is irrelevant. Georgia should have been No.1 from the jump, but at the same time, who really cares?
Once again, the polls got it wrong and used their bias instead of ranking teams how they should be. Eliminate the preseason and early-season polls because, at this point, no one cares.
Alabama almost lost to an unranked Texas team, and there were still people out there that thought they were the best team in the country. Meanwhile, Georgia is one of the only schools in college football that has yet to give up a touchdown and has blown out both of its opponents.
Rankings only matter at the end of the season when they either put a team into the playoffs or keep them out of it. Now that the expansion to 12 is coming, these preseason rankings matter even less.
Georgia doesn’t need a No.1 ranking to focus and demoralize teams. Smart doesn’t care about those rankings until the offseason, when he can likely use that as a recruiting tactic. He lets others worry about meaningless polls while he and his staff worry about winning football games.