[stupac2]

I know this will never, ever happen, but wouldn't it make an awful lot of sense to hold in the initial rankings until October? Until then we're just guessing.

Well, for one rankings generate too much interest, if the AP stopped doing it someone else would start and then we'd talk about their rankings instead. But even if we could completely stop it, people would just lean on other heuristics (OMG SEC, "blue bloods", etc) to decide who's good, which might be worse.

The only way to actually do this in a sensible manner is to create a computer system and let it run, but because that results in things people don't like (ie not a simple "sort by number of losses" system) the only people who look at them are nerds.

[stupac2]

I know this will never, ever happen, but wouldn't it make an awful lot of sense to hold in the initial rankings until October? Until then we're just guessing.

Well, for one rankings generate too much interest, if the AP stopped doing it someone else would start and then we'd talk about their rankings instead. But even if we could completely stop it, people would just lean on other heuristics (OMG SEC, "blue bloods", etc) to decide who's good, which might be worse.

The only way to actually do this in a sensible manner is to create a computer system and let it run, but because that results in things people don't like (ie not a simple "sort by number of losses" system) the only people who look at them are nerds.