The Rebels jumped to No. 4 with three first-place votes, and they're the only team in the country with two wins over currently ranked opponents. One side says rankings should reward what you've actually done on the field, full stop. The other says preseason pedigree exists for a reason and Georgia and Ohio State haven't lost either.
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Add your commentThe whole point of rankings is supposed to be "who's the best team right now." Ole Miss beat two ranked teams. Georgia and Ohio State beat who exactly? Some cupcakes and a couple mediocre conference opponents? If you can't defend the logic, the logic is bad.
My dad played for Ole Miss in the 80s. He called me last night and cried. Actual tears. Whatever happens with the rankings, this program hasn't felt like this in forty years.
The committee isn't a committee yet, this is the AP poll. Voters are protecting their preseason picks because admitting you were wrong is apparently a crime in college football.
The person saying "week 6 doesn't matter" clearly hasn't watched how committee members talk about poll rankings during selection show. They reference them constantly. Narrative momentum is a real thing in that room.
"It's a vibes poll" is the most honest thing anyone has said in this thread and also the most damning indictment of a system that has enormous influence over a billion-dollar sport.
If you disagree that Ole Miss deserves number one right now, explain how you square that with the fact that they are the only team in the country with multiple wins over ranked opponents. I'll wait.
Confidently asserting that Ohio State deserves to be ahead because "they haven't lost" is the most circular reasoning in sports. You could apply that logic to every unbeaten team in every division. Wins over ranked opponents are a tiebreaker. Ole Miss wins that tiebreaker. Done.
Ohio State plays in the Big Ten and the Big Ten is having a weird year. Half the teams they could beat to look impressive aren't even bowl eligible right now. The conference brand is doing more work than the actual wins and that should bother Big Ten fans more than it bothers me.
Yes, 5-0 with wins over nobody ranked at the time of the game. Ole Miss is also 5-0 with wins over two teams currently sitting in the top 25. These are not equivalent records and pretending they are is how bad rankings happen.
I've watched every Ole Miss game this season and I genuinely cannot tell you why they're not number one. Lane Kiffin is coaching circles around half these guys.
That's a fair question but the alternative — that only non-Southern writers are objective — is its own bias. A win over a ranked team is a win over a ranked team regardless of the zip code of the person watching.
Nobody's giving them credit because the national media didn't expect Ole Miss to be good so they didn't send their best reporters to Oxford in August and now they're playing catch-up. This is a structural media problem more than a bias problem.
Bottom line: the poll is going to look really dumb in December if Ole Miss runs the table, and the voters who kept them at four through the whole season will quietly pretend they had them pegged all along. It happens every single year with somebody. This year it's Ole Miss.
The AP poll is an opinion poll. It literally says that. Thirty percent of the voters had Ole Miss in the top two in the preseason and still ranked them fourth this week. So the bias is documented, it's not a conspiracy theory.
If Ole Miss finishes the regular season with three or four wins over ranked teams and still doesn't get the one seed I'm going to lose my mind. Bookmark this comment.
To the person saying preseason pedigree "exists for a reason" — okay, so did Ole Miss's two ranked wins happen in a vacuum? Those teams had pedigree too. That's kind of the whole point.
Here's what I don't understand. The committee penalizes teams at the end of the year for weak schedules. Ole Miss is building the exact strong-schedule argument right now in real time. Shouldn't the weekly rankings track with that? Why are we waiting to reward it?
That response to the coach is embarrassing. The principle of rewarding on-field results applies at every level. The game is the game.
Because perception shapes narratives and narratives shape committee discussion and committee discussion shapes seeds. Week 6 matters more than people want to admit.
I'm a casual fan, I watch maybe four games a week, and even I can see Ole Miss has done more impressive things than the teams ranked above them. If the casual eye test is that obvious, the expert voter should be embarrassed.
Okay but is anyone going to talk about the gap in remaining schedules? Ole Miss still has to run through the back half of the SEC. Georgia has a slightly more forgiving stretch. That matters when you're predicting championship runs.
I actually started the season thinking Ole Miss would go .500 in the SEC. I was wrong. I'm updating my priors. It's not hard. More AP voters should try it.
Four feels right to me right now honestly. Let them keep winning. If they're still playing like this in October nobody keeps them out. The ranking catches up to the performance eventually, it always does.
I'm a sportswriter covering the SEC and the honest answer nobody wants to say out loud is that brand recognition drives eyeballs and the AP voters know it. Ohio State in the top 5 means more clicks than Ole Miss in the top 5. It's gross but it's real.
can we talk about that offensive line for a second because its genuinely one of the most impressive units ive seen all year and nobody nationally is giving them credit
As a Michigan fan I'll grudgingly say that's not entirely wrong about this particular season. The middle of the Big Ten has been a mess.
Because the weekly rankings aren't the committee and people keep conflating them. AP voters are journalists voting their gut. It's a vibes poll. Always has been.
Georgia is coasting on 2021 and 2022 goodwill at this point. Two national titles buys you apparently infinite poll cushion even when your 2024 performance is meh.
I coached high school football for 22 years and the principle that you reward what happened on the field rather than what you predicted would happen is the most basic thing in the sport. The AP voters are failing the sport's own logic.
Lane Kiffin has been one of the most innovative offensive minds in the sport for years and the national press treated him like a circus act for so long that there's genuine institutional reluctance to give him the credibility this moment deserves.
Georgia fan here. I'm not even going to pretend we've done anything impressive enough to justify being above Ole Miss right now. Our schedule has been embarrassingly soft.
"Eventually" isn't good enough when seeding and perception affect which games you get and where you play them. Telling a team to just keep winning while systematically undervaluing their wins is a rigged game.
The three first-place votes Ole Miss got are interesting. Who are those voters and are they in the South? I genuinely wonder if there's geographic bias in the opposite direction where Southern writers overcorrect to prove they're not homerish.
I went to Ole Miss. I live in Oxford. We're not used to being relevant and honestly the whole city feels different right now. Restaurants are packed on weeknights. It's bizarre and wonderful.
"predicting championship runs" is not what the weekly rankings are supposed to be doing. You're ranking the future not the present. There's literally a playoff for figuring out the champion.
The gap in this thread is that nobody's actually laid out Ole Miss's remaining schedule opponent by opponent and projected how many more ranked wins they could add. That would tell us a lot about whether this ranking debate even matters in November.
Lane Kiffin could go 15-0 and people would still find a reason to dock Ole Miss. The bias against him personally is real and I say this as someone who couldn't stand him at USC.
michigan fan admitting something negative about the big ten is the most surprising thing ive read today
preseason pedigree exists for a reason because it represents the accumulated talent and program history that matters all season not just six weeks in, this isnt a weird opinion its literally how the sport has always worked
week 6 poll doesnt matter at all for the playoff committee anyway so why is everyone losing their minds
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