With both the Associated Press and USA Today Coaches Poll having now released their preseason rankings, I wondered how the BYU football players felt about being No. 25 in the AP poll and unranked in the “Others receiving votes” category in the coaches poll.

I asked Cougar sophomore tight end Isaac Rex if they even mattered — and got a great response.

“I don’t even know where we are at — or care,” Rex said. “To be honest, those things are annoying anyways because they change after the first week. So why don’t we just do it after the first game? I guess it’s just a money grab or something. I mean, you see schools that are ranked like No. 7 on there in the preseason and then they are not on it the rest of the time. I feel like they should after the first game just figure it out.”

You know, Rex is right, of course.

As a football beat writer, I’ve participated in various national votes and I know it’s almost impossible to truly keep up with everything that’s going on.

And the preseason polls are even more ridiculous because there are so few certainties when it comes to what athletes in their teens and early 20s are going to do on game day.

So what do pollsters base their guesses on?

I suspect the four factors that get the most attention are:

1. Reputation (somewhat overrated)
2. Recruiting class (extremely overrated)
3. Number of returning players (somewhat underrated)
4. Previous year’s performance (unequally applied)

Those are certainly far from comprehensive metrics and adequately applying them to more than 100 college football programs is a gargantuan task for voters who have other things to do.

It helps me understand the overreactions and complete misses that are so common, since it’s impossible to know what will happen.

And the difficulty is compounded by other situations.

Take having new coaches, since some excel with the guys left by the previous regime and others struggle to get everyone going the right direction. Five of the teams in the AP Top 25 have new coaches, so that will be a factor.

And what do you do about transfers?

They have to start anew with new teammates, new systems, new academic pressures. Just as with coaches, some do well (maybe 25%) and many really struggle.

Another factor that is almost impossible to quantify is the impact of name, image and likeness (NIL) deal pressures. Kids making hundreds of thousands — or even millions — of dollars aren’t going to be dealing with the same expectations as those who just have a scholarship.

So when teams that are ranked now struggle in the weeks to come, don’t be surprised.

While I don’t blame the pollsters for being wrong, I do blame them for some of their blatant errors.

Here are three things I wish they would do better:

1. Give winners more credit

When two teams play a game, there are a lot of statistics or impressions that analysts point to. But here is the plain, unvarnished truth: The best team always — ALWAYS — wins.

That’s because the only stat that matters is the one on the scoreboard.

It gets tricky because there are triangles, such as in 2021 when Oregon was better than Ohio State, who was better than Utah, who was better than Oregon.

Still, I hate excuses for teams that lose. Every team is dealing with injuries and adversity. Winners win anyway.

There are too few data points in college football for free passes. Poll voters need to reward the victors and dock the losers accordingly.

2. Make teams succeed before ranking them

There is no way USC, which went 4-8 last year, should be ranked at No. 14 or No. 15. I know the Trojans have a new coach and big-name transfers and a reputation, but they haven’t done anything on the field in a long time.

The coaches poll has Texas (5-7 in 2021)  at No. 18 for precisely the same reasons.

Even Utah — who I think will be decent this season — has some question marks on its résumé, since its best non-conference win last fall was over FCS opponent Weber State and its best road win was at unimpressive USC. Yes, the Utes won the Pac-12 but that wasn’t saying much last year since the league was so mediocre.

I think there are plenty of other teams whose performance last fall and returning pieces merit much greater recognition than teams who are just “expected” to be good because they have big names.

3. Reevaluate fairly every week

This is the biggest problem with preseason polls, since they skew national perception before games are played.

If a voter comes into a season thinking one team will be good, how many losses does that team have to have before the voter admits they were wrong? One? Two? Three? More?

In Oregon’s case last year, voters just chose to ignore the fact that the Ducks lost to Stanford (3-9) since it didn’t jive with their opinion that Oregon was an elite team. Ignoring the facts that you don’t like shouldn’t be in college football (or politics, but that’s a discussion for another time).

On the flip side, teams that aren’t highly regarded get no margin of error at all. If No. 7 Utah loses by three TDs at unranked Florida and No. 25 BYU loses in overtime to No. 10-ranked Baylor in Provo, which team is still more likely to fall out of the rankings?

If poll voters truly want to do their jobs well, they need to toss out the rankings from the previous week completely and attempt to objectively vote where teams deserve to be based on their total performance up to that point in the season.

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