Tuesday will bring the 2021 season’s first edition of the weekly College Football Playoff rankings, a brilliant piece of sports entertainment ex nihilo from ESPN.
The weekly iterations of the rankings mean nothing. The people who contribute to them explicitly say they start over each week, so what you saw the week before purportedly has no relationship to how the teams are ordered the next. The only edition that matters won’t be unveiled until the regular season is over and done.
Nevertheless, Tuesday’s release will still prompt endless speculation about what it all means. And because teams will have numbers next to their names, some fans will start playing the “disrespect” card.