It's really annoying for espn to blow them all week.
Isn't it funny that Texas A&M and Missouri sucked so bad in the big 12. Now they are winning ball games?
The preseason ranking circle jerk and incestuous conference play will do that. Conferences should seize to exist because it's impossible to compare teams who don't have many mutual opponents. Rankings shouldn't come out until week 9 because it's impossible to rank teams when they haven't played many meaningful games yet (and games can't be considered meaningful until enough games have been played to the point where we can accurately determine rankings). It'll continue to spiral downhill unless it's changed because of the media bias.
You have to use a ranking system for college football because the season is short and you can't play a lot of games. (Having a lot of games removes the need for rankings because win-loss record is good enough, see the NBA or MLB). Since we can't play a lot of games, we can't have a true playoff either, so the accuracy of rankings is critical.
In order to have accurate rankings, you need as much cross breeding between the "power conference" teams as possible. You can't accurately apply the x beat y and y beat z therefore x will beat z principle if there are only three teams in the network. But if x beat y, w, and q and y,w, and q all beat z, you can more accurately claim that x will beat z (and deserves to be ranked higher even though they haven't played).
The way it's set up now, with power conferences only playing each other, the occasional cross breeding game, and the rest of the schedule filled with cupcakes, you can't tell who is better than whom. Therefore, current rankings get based on the preseason rankings which are meaningless because the teams are inherently impossible to rank against each other since they don't play each other.
