To be clear I'm talking about pre-season Top 25 Rankings and the rankings that the associated press give. Rankings IMO shouldn't happen until after week 4 probably. A lot of P4 teams play cupcakes week 1 and 2 or like Ole Miss this year weeks 1 through 4.
1. No one knows actually how good any team is until you actually get a look at how any individual team plays against another team.
2. It benefits teams unfairly
Take LSU for example. Pre-season they were 13th. Then they get beat by USC who was pre-season 23rd. LSU drops 5 spots after the loss to 18th but then pick up 2 spots beating a cupcake and move to 16. They then benefit from beating an Ole Miss team who benefited from high pre-season ranking.
Ole Miss started the pre-season ranked 6th and then spent the 1st 4 weeks beating cupcakes and moved up to 5th. Then when they lost a close game to Kentucky they only dropped one spot to 5th.
3. As CB has rightly pointed the voters ranking these teams which the polls use seemingly know less than CFB fans or are just stupidly biased.
4. As pointed out last night on CB some of these B10 and SEC teams are only playing 4 away games.
5. Should Alabama be in the playoffs in a year they lost to Vanderbilt? 🙂