By now, it’s almost old news that the AP preseason poll has come out, with Georgia at the top for the first time in its history. Of course, in and of itself, that’s no guarantee of ultimate success, as only ten teams starting out in that position have gone on to win a MNC. An SEC team hasn’t accomplished it in thirty years. So we’ll see.
What caught my eye about the AP poll was something that Matt Hinton went to the trouble to verify: how similar the AP rankings are to those in the coaches poll. Take a look at this chart:
You have to go down to #25 to find your first major discrepancy. That’s pretty strange, considering how chaotic the previous season turned out to be. And the preseason polls were in fair agreement last year, too. Wishful thinking or lack of imagination? We’ll see.
Get The Picture 
I think a lot of it is ‘follow the leader’ and the press looked at the coach’s votes in their pole and went from there.
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Why are ESPN pundits allowed a vote? Isn’t that a conflict of interest?
Seeing Chris Fowler, Herbstriet, & Craig James have a vote doesn’t make sense to me.
Herbie ranked Florida #1. LOL. And does the AP realize that James’s son plays for Texas Tech?
But my real beef is with Mitch Vingle. What a moron! He voted us 7th with Auburn and Clemson ahead of us. Seriously???
But upon closer inspection I see ‘ol Mitch is a Mountainqueer homer. I’m assuming his idiotic logic is that if Auburn is ranked high and W Va beats them, the bigger the win for the other pollsters. Ugh.
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This is sorta a pet peeve of mine, but I hate it when teams are listed as #26, #27, etc. They received votes, but no one voted them at that ranking. It’s a top 25 poll. If the poll were extended to a top 30 or 35, 26-35 could be very different than what’s shown above. We don’t know where those who did not list the teams receiving votes on their ballots would’ve put those teams.
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At least the Tech didn’t come in at #25
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Probably the latter, I suspect.
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