What is the measure of a man?
Is it his good deeds? His accomplishments? His wealth? His friends and family?
Or, perhaps, is it his ability to receive points in an imaginary popularity contest based on nothing but conjecture and the idea that "eeehhh maybe throw in another SEC team at 22, whatever"?
Ohio State is, for now, the 6th-ranked team in both the Coaches Poll and the AP top 25 Poll. They received four first-place votes in the AP Poll and two in the Coaches Poll. The Buckeyes moved up from their positions in the polls from the previous week, when the AP Poll didn't have them ranked at all, and the Coaches Poll had them at 10 (and still, with two first-place votes). Currently, Ryan Day and company have more first-place votes than the second ranked team in the AP Poll, the Alabama Crimson Tide.
Ohio State football has still not played a game, and won't for another three weeks.
My favorite part about all of this is that Ohio State has benefited in part from the national perception of the program. That's not the funny part. The funny part is that by literally doing nothing and watching other teams lose, the Buckeyes have been able to improve their position in college football and will likely continue to do so for the next several weeks.
The teams in front of them in the polls (Clemson, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Notre Dame) are going to play at least one ranked team before Ohio State starts their season on the 24th, and Alabama and Georgia play each other the week before that. Assuming that there aren't further cancellations or delays to games, and that is admittedly a pretty huge assumption at this point, there is no advantage whatsoever for a highly ranked team to be playing anyone right now.
It's not just Ohio State who benefits. As the Buckeyes jumped four spots in the Coaches Poll from the previous week, Penn State (who, as you might have heard, has also not played any games) was bumped up three. Wisconsin and Michigan both lost a spot, but the larger point is that both major polls have ranked four Big Ten teams based on... nothing. Literally nothing.
So what else is new?
For any team, really. In an ideal, normal season, most contenders for the College Football Playoff would be emerging from September right about now with maybe one decent win under their belt, assuming their athletic directors had enough gumption and luck that the marquee opponent they scheduled in 2003 for this season remained a marquee opponent a generation later. The AP and Coaches Polls would've begun settling on the four or five teams that most people believe would have a shot to win the national championship, and everything would be set from there.
2020 could've been different. Instead of rushing to create an acceptable college football narrative in the absence of weeks of speculation and preseason polls, the AP and Coaches Polls could've simply waited until mid-to-late October to figure out how they felt about the hierarchy or college football teams. But nope! They went ahead and ranked the hell out of everybody to maintain some kind of relevance in an increasingly weird season.
Ohio State would've been fine either way; the Buckeyes are loaded and I fully expect them to whip the asses of every team that they play. I don't think there would've been a difference had they not been ranked until they played a game.
All of this is proof of why ranking and polling in general is an inherently ridiculous endeavor, especially so early in your typical football season. The Buckeyes, who have only practice reports to their name, are being voted on as potentially the best team in the country and are somehow improving their standing. The defending national champions immediately dropped a game, as did another one of the major contenders. One of the top five teams was forced to cancel a game and others may follow, something that happens even in non-COVID years.
Much like a lot of things in sports, polling exists in large part to justify its own existence. It's been around forever, so we keep doing it, and as a part of the fabric of how we consume college football it is probably never going away. That's fine. But in my ideal universe, polls and rankings don't exist until October; that's never going to happen, but damn it'd feel good to finally admit that no one really knows anything until we're well into the season.
If this ridiculous year has proven anything, it's that some of the norms that we relied upon will get upended on a pretty regular basis. It's okay to wait more than zero games to decide who the best teams in the country are, and in 2020, maybe it's okay to just sit back and let the playoff committee do their thing in mid November. The horse race, which has always been flawed, is over for now. There's no reason to start it back up again in 2021.
