2024 college football offseason thread

Bring back the SJ poll.

 

I ain’t wrong. Ours was researched better.

 

Give or take a Ball State.

 

I did this several years for AP. One year, during basketball season, I was having trouble tracking down scores on Sunday because of so many late Saturday night games. I looked at my list of "teams to follow" and just shook my head. I discovered I was tracking 75 teams. I was tracking teams that weren't even going to be in the tournament. Stupid. I was making the task much harder, when I knew other voters didn't give half the shit I did (i.e. giving Colorado a football vote). I think I immediately chopped off the bottom 30 from my list.

The worst was the Sunday night when Hank Gathers died. I had the biggest story of my career dropped in my lap and I knew it, so I gave maximum effort. This was before cellphones. When I sent in my final story right at deadline, the desk told me that AP (John Nadel, Ken Peters, Beth Harris) had been calling and calling, asking for my Top 25 ballot. F**k it. That was at the bottom of my to-do list, but the country was waiting as March Madness was unfolding. I drove home from Loyola Marymount (I lived about 10 minutes away) and found a power outage on my block. I couldn't open the electric gate to get to my parking spot. I parked on the street and went into my condo. I had to use a flashlight and I had no idea about the other results. I called AP and asked them for the results I was missing, threw the list together and gave it to them.

 

Except for the intro writups. Some guy pulled those out of his ass each week!

 

Challenge for any Big Ten or Big 12 team. You can start the year 7-0 without having to play a game. But you have to end the schedule with Florida's November schedule.

No. 1 Georgia
No. 4 Texas
No. 13 LSU
No. 6 Ole Miss
No. 10 Florida State

Any takers?

 

And interesting conflicts!

 

That, plus a lot of them were placed on waivers for the purpose of being given their unconditional release due to a cheating and honor code violation.

 

Do you mean that literally? Ie the first game of this theoretical season is vs. Georgia?
I don’t think anybody would take that deal.
Now if you mean the team is 7-0 having played seven bad teams, I think there might be a few takers but very few.

What happens to Napier if the Gators start 7-0 — and move into the top 5 as a result — but lose four straight? Does he survive or get whacked?

 

Nobody with a poll ballot will be fooled into thinking the Gators are top 5 material. But they do have some meat on the front end of the schedule. Miami and A&M at home plus a trip to Rocky Top.

I think his point is they have an absolute hell month looming.