Texas A&M @ South Carolina and Boise State v Ole Miss (neutral field) both on Thursday
West Virgina v Alabama (neutral field), Wisconsin v LSU (neutral field) and Clemson @ Georgia on Saturday.
Probably won’t be a great game, but Southern Miss @ MS State is significant, because these teams haven’t played in years. Southern Miss is sort of the odd man out in Mississippi college sports. Ole Miss and State get most of the money and “glory”. They also very much do NOT want to lose to Southern Miss.
Before anyone start bitching about preseason polls giving teams an unfair advantage, let the record reflect that Auburn was UNRANKED going into last season.
Hey, y’all! It’s great to see so many of you turning out this early in the season.
If you will, take a look at Week 1 CFB – Who stays in the AP Top Ten? from 08-26-2013 and see that we have several weeks before that time this year during which time we should be able to come up with some improvements over last year’s fun with the games.
I welcome suggestions on how to broaden the appeal of these things. We had a good solid group of regulars last year and I’d like to hope we can attract more participants this time.
Afraid you’re right, Oak. I looked back at last year’s polls by week on the Top Ten teams and the total number of participants (albeit with 8 who contributed 5 weeks or more) was 42, with 25 only showing up one week.
How do you feel about starting early, even before the AP Preseason rankings come out, and using last year’s final BCS rankings as a way to select the Top 10 or 25? That link three posts back could be the basis for the first poll if we went that way.
I just looked at that link. Wow. I want some of whatever they were smoking. Hard to argue Florida St and Auburn 1-2, but Michigan State, South Carolina, and Missouri at 3-4-5? WTF? South Carolina and Missouri might not even be 4-5 in the SEC. Auburn, Bama, LSU, Georgia, Ole Miss, and Texas A&M are all going to be good this year…
It was BCS, believe it or not. Much magic. But when you look at such things as Preseason Prediction Accuracy (2013) it’s easy to see that the preseason rankings are precious little more than crapshoots. Even the AP and Coaches. But you have to start somewhere, I guess, unless you want a bodacious poll of all of the FBS teams, even though something like 60 of them will have losing seasons.
SEC teams playing in Georgia and in Houston TX against teams from Idaho, WV and Wisconsin strike me as being neutral fields in name only. Twenty years ago Notre Dame hoops used to play an annual game Kentucky on a supposedly neutral court in Louisville KY. Same thing. Not really neutral at all, IMHO.