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Top 25 Week is here, and folks, that means college football is on its way
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At this time last year, it felt a bit like putting lipstick on a pig.
Talking about college football was trickier than ever in 2020. We didn’t know how the season would play out, how many games would get canceled and what exactly the finish line would look like. All of our usual preseason rankings felt a bit useless to a certain extent. At this time, we were under the impression that the B1G might not play football. To say that things were in flux would’ve been an understatement.
Well, dare I say, this feels a bit different in 2021.
Yes, it looks like we’re heading back to full capacity crowds across the country. Cheers to that.
No, we’re not heading for an entirely normal year. Greg Sankey said at SEC Media Days that 6 of 14 teams were above 80% COVID vaccination threshold and that those numbers needed to improve rapidly. There’s at least a chance that we see players sidelined after positive COVID tests.
But Saturday Tradition’s annual Top 25 Week is no place for negativity. It’s a place where we can do what we, as college football fans, love to do. That is, get mad about rankings. And to be clear, that’s not my way of saying rankings are meaningless. That’s weak. For 2/3 of the year, rankings are all we have. They generate discussion. Recruits see that. Boosters brag about that. Teams sell tickets off that.
Consider that my way of saying that Top 25 Week matters, buddy.
It’s not just debating whether Indiana deserves to start ahead of Ole Miss, despite what all of us saw play out at last year’s Outback Bowl. It’s not just discussing who the best transfer in the B1G is, either. It’s all of it.
What does “all of it” entail?
Here’s the Top 25 Week schedule here at SDS:
- MONDAY, Aug. 9
- Top 25 teams in college football
- Top 25 coaches in college football
- TUESDAY, Aug. 10
- Top 25 B1G players for 2021
- Top 25 quarterbacks for 2021
- WEDNESDAY, Aug. 11
- Top 25 transfers in the B1G
- Top 25 offensive coordinators in college football
- Top 25 defensive coordinators in college football
- THURSDAY, Aug. 12
- Top 25 running backs in college football
- Top 25 defensive players in college football
- FRIDAY, Aug. 13
- Top 25 true freshmen in the B1G
- Top 25 B1G draft prospects for 2022
- SATURDAY, Aug. 14
- Top 25 games in college football in 2021
To recap, that’s 12 Top 25 stories over the course of the next week. If you’re a college football fan who doesn’t need any more realignment/vaccine/12-team Playoff/NIL discussion, you’re in luck.
(And if you can’t get enough of those subjects, we’ve got you covered on all of that, too.)
It’s about time we dig in even deeper to the stuff that’ll happen in between the lines this fall. Will Derek Stingley have a bounce-back year? Is somebody other than Spencer Rattler worthy of being the best quarterback in college football? Does anybody have a 1-2 punch at receiver better than Ohio State’s Garrett Wilson and Chris Olave? Did Jimbo Fisher’s breakthrough 2020 put him back into the top 5 coaches in America?
These are the debates we need to get back to. You want to talk ball? We want to talk ball.
Top 25 Week forces us at Saturday Tradition to make tough decisions. You disagree with a ranking? Let us know. Comment, let us know on social media, shout it from your roof, whatever. All we ask is that you do it respectfully. It’d be weird if we agreed on everything. We expect disagreement, and there’s nothing wrong with some healthy back-and-forth.
Well, I think that just about covers it. I feel like ahead of this week of disagreement, I should say something that I know we can all agree on.
Yay for the 12-team Playoff? No, that’s probably not a unanimous opinion. Nick Saban is the No. 1 coach in the sport? Whoops. That’s not a universal opinion, either.
Who are we kidding? There’s nothing that all of us truly agree on. Wait! I’ve got it!
Fix targeting.
Welcome to Top 25 Week, y’all.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Tradition. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.