After just a few weeks of play in the NFL’s minor league...er... college football, there have already been some major surprises. In one of the biggest upsets in college football history, Wisconsin managed to knock off perennial powerhouse UNLV in the waning moments of the contest.

Oh, and No. 5 Michigan lost to Appalachian State, marking the first time a Division I-AA team has ever beaten a ranked Division I-A foe.

This upset could have unfairly ended Michigan’s season, seeing as one loss in college football basically eliminates any chance at winning the national championship.

Fortunately, this won’t be the only blemish on Michigan’s record. The Wolverines followed the shocking defeat with yet another shellacking, losing 39-7 to Oregon the next week.

Now it’s quite clear that Michigan, a team almost everybody predicted to contend for a national title, won’t be drawing the short straw come playoff time, they won’t even be in the drawing.

Which makes one wonder, how can a team this bad start the season ranked as the fifth best squad in the whole country? The answer is simple. The rankings, especially in the preseason, are absolutely meaningless.

Since college football adopted the BCS rankings and all the fun that goes with them, most ranking systems, such as the AP Top 25, are completely arbitrary. The BCS rankings are determined through a combination of the USA Today Coaches Poll, The Harris Interactive Poll, and of course, the flawless computer rankings.

The BCS Bowl games are then determined by the top 10 teams according to the aforementioned BCS rankings. The rest of the bowl games, even the some-start-up-company-that-will-inevitably-fail.com Bowl, are determined by pairing teams based on conference standings.

The BCS rankings, which determine college football’s postseason, don’t come about until the eighth week of the season. So really, it doesn’t matter where Michigan was ranked in the preseason, or what substance any members of the voting media were taking when they ranked them. It won’t matter until week eight.

Obviously, the ranking system currently employed by college football isn’t perfect. There has been talk about implementing a playoff format, but we’ll save the obligatory bowl games versus playoffs argument for a later date.

Even if the NCAA decided on using playoffs to determine the national champion, preseason rankings would still be rendered utterly useless. While rankings are always a nice and fun little tool to look at, they generally carry no purpose or importance until later in the season.

There is a reason that the rankings that actually matter don’t come out until most of the season has already been played. It’s impossible to judge a team’s performance if the team hasn’t had any performances.

When you think about it, preseason rankings are no different than supermodels. Sure, they’re nice to look at, but they don’t carry any actual weight and are so insignificant that their very existence should be questioned.

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