Apparently, this is the year of the upset in college football.
But why?
Sure, seven teams ranked in the top 10 of the AP preseason poll already have at least one loss on their records, but what makes these teams considered elite before the season begins?
It is the preseason polls that create these notions that some teams are the best in the nation when eventually they will prove they are nothing more than frauds.
Every year, a bunch of voters decide which teams are the best in the nation based off their performances in the previous season, player turnover in the offseason and their schedules heading into the season.
Nowhere in the consideration is how teams have fared so far through the season.
Once the teams have been voted to a spot in the rankings, only a loss can significantly drop them from that spot, and only a loss by another team can allow them to leap in the rankings.
This makes it hard for a team that has played extremely well in the current year to move up on its own, and God forbid that team loses a game, because it probably will find itself in the back half of the top 25 or out of the poll altogether.
But teams like USC and Oklahoma barely fall after losses. Neither team fell out of the top 15 after its early season loss, and USC's defeat came at the hands of unranked Washington.
This system makes every season the year of the upset in college football because no one really knows if any of these teams in the preseason top 10 will be as good as they are expected to be.
Since 2002, only once have the AP voters been correct in the preseason about which team would be the best in the nation at the end - USC was No. 1 before and after the 2004 season.
And the rest of their top 10s have not looked much better.
In that same time, 2007 had the most preseason top 10 teams (six) finish there after year's end.
Last year was arguably the pollsters' worst, though.
Only four teams stayed in the top 10 after the season, and three of those preseason top-10 teams were not even ranked by year's end - LSU, Clemson and Auburn.
This season, the preseason poll has obviously not gotten off to a good start with four top 10 teams already out of that group.
These preseason polls are fun for fans and make it easier for the media to call a season the year of the upset when preseason predictions begin to crumble, but they don't do any good for college football.
All they really do is make things harder for teams that enter the season already considered not very good despite not playing a down.
A lot of these teams aren't good and were rightfully left out of the preseason polls, but they should at least be given the chance to prove they suck before being labeled as such.
In a similar fashion, some of the teams in the preseason polls are top teams, but they should have to prove it on the field, rather than be given an advantage by a bunch of voters who are making guesses.
