Nitt Picks Is Making Its Own News

 Wow, that happened fast. Dr. Saturday scoured the internets for your traditional uber-early preseason rankings, something that seemed to happen a lot sooner than I remember in prior seasons. Some of these polls aren't even properly taking into account who is staying and who is going, but for what it's worth, here is your BSD Relevance Chart:

This thing couldn't have turned out any more typical.  You all know who is almost universally ranked higher than Penn State so I'm not going to bother typing it out.  As for the only other Big Ten team to get any mention, that would be a surging but Greenless Iowa squad.  (Unrelated to the rankings, but it is interesting to note that Iowa plays at Penn State, at Wisconsin, at Michigan State and at Ohio State next season.)

Now I'm asking you (begging you, really) not to look at these individual rankings and argue the placements but, rather, to look at the chart above and laugh at how ridiculous the exercise is.  

• For starters, these things are almost identical.  The whole premise of Dr. Saturdays original post was that just about everyone is picking Florida and Texas 1-2, but it's worth noting that no one really digress much all the way down the line.
• Penn State loses players and has question marks, but so does literally ever other D1a team.  These ranking depend heavily on pretending to be able to even come close to predicting the level of performance of key personnel who most of these writers have never actually seen play a real snap.
• There is absolutely no creativity at all.  Preseason polls routinely look nothing like their year end cousins, yet every off season these same writers, the ones who influence the coaches' preseason poll and sometimes even vote themselves in the AP or Harris, give us these same safe-to-a-fault rankings.  
• If you are going to look stupid at the end of the year, which you almost certainly are if history is any guide, at least have some fun with it.  People have no problem saying interesting things when filling out their March Madness polls; these things are just as much guess work and would be a lot more fun if approached with the same mentality (or just gotten rid of, but that's another post).

Robert and Alfred are rival magicians.  That's the opening plot summary of The Prestige.  This is an excerpt of the plot summary of ESPN's Prestige Rankings:

Who is No. 1?...[T]he ESPN Research Department devised a plan to settle the argument. Its system lets the numbers do the talking.

So you know where this is headed: figure out a formula that puts the teams with the biggest fan bases at the top, release that list in pieces with cute little blurbs after each one, then, get message boards and blogs to link to your site and drive advert....ah, damnit.

Anyway, I won't hold you in suspense any longer:

11. Penn State Nittany Lions
Total points: 1,088
Positives: Penn State's two national championships were won in the 1980s ('82, '86). The Nittany Lions' 26 bowl wins are tied with USC for the second most overall, trailing only Alabama (31). RB John Cappelletti won the Heisman Trophy in 1973. The program has never been put on probation by the NCAA. Going 11-2 while claiming its third Big Ten title in 2008 catapulted PSU past Tennessee into 11th in our rankings.

The idea is to give each program points based on measurable performance.  Things like MNC's, conference championships, "major" bowl wins, and individual honors are used to keep score.

I don't have much to say except Penn State gets hammered here for their undefeated season MNC hose jobs as well as their lack of a conference for much of the measurable period (1936-2008).  Hardly apples and apples, but "fair" isn't really what they are going for here anyway.

Rittenburg has a review of the teams below Penn State and The Nittany Line goes into more detail about the rating system and its flaws.

Words and no action; it's just part of the job.  The Coaches has been talking about two pretty major changes they would like to see happen but probably won't.  I'm of the opinion that both would be pretty terrible moves.

The first involves returning back to the days when the Coaches weren't forced to hide their willingness to whore out the BCS process to give their team an undeserved advantage.  Mgoblog takes on this one:

The only thing worse than having a group of people suffused with naked self-interest vote on who should be in the national championship game is having that group of people do so anonymously. The coaches poll shouldn't be allowed to participate in the selection process unless it's willing to publicize their ballots, period. If that causes coaches to cover themselves with conference mates, the issue is not the open ballot, it's having vast conflicts of interest in your pollsters.

I agree, of course, but still remain intensely confused how the idea of the Coaches poll as a BCS data point was approved in the first place.  

There is also the annual talk about an early signing day, but this time I disagree with Brian's assessment:

Why, exactly, is a late-December signing period impossible to work with? Why can basketball have an early period in which the vast majority of recruits sign, but not football? Why go against something that 73% of coaches support?

I think part of the answer might be the same one we agree on above: that the coaches are going to make self-serving decisions when given the opportunity. Yes, decommitments are an annoyance for coaches and fans alike, but does creating an early signing period really help out the recruit? And isn't that what this whole thing is about, letting them make the best decision for themselves?  

In scores of other games...BHGP wants equal punishment under the law.