History shows us that when the rankings for the second week are revealed Georgia will drop a few places. This seems odd to me. If the best team plays the second best team and they seem fairly balanced and equal opponents then I'm not sure how the second best team is no longer considered the second best team. I set up the scenario with these teams meeting in the first week so it was possible to end up with these two teams meeting again to play for the championship at the end of the season. If Florida went undefeated the rest of the season then they would obviously end up number one. If Georgia went undefeated the rest of the season it is quite possible they could climb back into the number two ranking if the teams ahead of them lost along the way.
Now let's imagine the same two teams are ranked the same, number one and two, but they don't meet until the ninth week of the season. The game plays out exactly the same and Florida wins by two in triple overtime. Georgia will drop in the rankings and, because it is late in the season, they will have no opportunity to climb back into the number two ranking. Thus, the exact same teams playing the exact same game with the exact same results could end up yielding an entirely different championship match up at the end of the season simply because we somehow deem their rankings differently at different times in the season.
This essay really isn't about college football, it's about a flawed grading scale. I purposely picked college football because of the subjective approach they take to ranking their teams. They have a couple of different polls and this leads to a third poll that is a combination of the other two. Confused yet? One poll consists of coaches voting and ranking the teams and the other one is voted on by members of the media. Each person simply can vote and rank the teams based on who they think is good and one coach's top twenty rankings might be entirely different than another coaches. Same is true for the media voters. The entire ranking system is subjective.
Now let's look at the NFL. Their ranking system isn't subjective at all, it's objective. Teams play in conferences and divisions and each game played results in a win or a loss or a rare tie. At the end up the season the wins are tallied up for each division and the team with the most W's moves on to the playoffs. The teams are matched against each other based on their records; the best team in the playoff gets to play against the worst team in the playoffs. A team wins and they move on. At the end there is only one team left and they are the best team in the league. What I think of the team, what another fan thinks of the team, what a coach thinks of the team, what a member of the media thinks of the team is irrelevant.
Subjective grading scales cause problems. Almost every year there is controversy with the NCAA football rankings. There is never any controversy with the NFL's rankings. We're not simply deciding who is the best team in the NFL based on feelings. Just because a player puts his finger up in the air and signals to the camera that his team is number one or a fan dons a giant foam hand with the same sentiments, we don't believe them. We set objective standards and the team that meets those standards is deemed the best.
What standard do we use when we grade some more important issues in our daily lives, subjective or objective? When someone says our President is destroying our freedoms can we objectively rank that statement or do we just resign to let everyone base their facts on feelings? What about when someone says the President is destroying our economy? Are there things we could all agree to use as standards to verify claims of this nature or is it alright to just believe our economy is bad and that's good enough? What about when it is exclaimed our President is weakening our military? Is there a grading scale we could all agree to use to judge this statement or do we just get to make subjective observations about serious subjects? When someone says that rich people create jobs and base the economic system of the country on their claim should we have an objective or subjective standard to evaluate the accuracy of this belief?
My challenge to you isn't to convince you what to think about any specific issue. What concerns me is how we think about issues. We have to all agree to use objective standards in order to perform honest evaluation of any particular claim. Anything less ultimately leads to me watching two six and five teams playing in some over named and over advertised "bowl game" on one of my favorite subjective holidays.
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