Sports
AP Top 25 Has Ten SEC Teams And Fifteen Hostages
By Michael Yappaport, . BSN Network. Satire.
The Associated Press released its college football Top 25 on Sunday and it now contains ten Southeastern Conference teams, which is either a remarkable achievement in regional dominance or a hostage situation depending on how much you paid for your out-of-conference schedule.
Ole Miss moved to No. 4 after beating LSU. The Rebels are ranked fourth in the country. Ole Miss. Fourth. A program whose entire identity for thirty years was being the team that almost did something.
LSU lost and slid to No. 10. They lost, and they are still tenth in the country. In any other conference that is a team that quietly disappears from the poll for three weeks. In the SEC it is called a slide. The Tigers slid. The mercy extended to LSU every single week by AP voters is genuinely historic.
Florida cracked the rankings and Mississippi State walked in behind them, which means the SEC now occupies exactly forty percent of the AP Top 25. The Big Ten, which has been loudly announcing its own expansion and relevance for eighteen consecutive months, has a fraction of that. They will be issuing a statement about it.
Jim Harbaugh, reached for comment, reportedly stared at a whiteboard for forty-five minutes and then drew a circle around Michigan.
The fifteen non-SEC teams still listed in the Top 25 are doing their best. They are ranked just high enough that their fans feel validated and just low enough that nobody can be blamed for anything. Try to name them. Go ahead. You will get three and then start guessing. These are fine programs. They are the little cups of coleslaw that come with the sandwich. Nobody ordered them specifically. They are simply present.
What is happening in college football is not complicated. The SEC takes the best players, pays them through NIL deals that are technically not payments, recruits the entire state of Georgia every single year regardless of whether Georgia needs more defensive linemen (it always needs more defensive linemen), and then expresses surprise when ten of its teams are ranked in a poll designed to rank the twenty-five best teams in the country.
Commissioner Greg Sankey released a statement calling this "a testament to the depth and competitiveness of SEC football," which is true the same way saying Walmart has a lot of products is true. Yes. Correct. Also perhaps a structural problem worth examining.
The most honest thing the AP could do at this point is print two polls. The actual AP Top 25, and then a separate list called "The Other Teams," with a small note at the bottom explaining that they tried.
Ole Miss plays again next week. If they win they will be ranked third in the country and every television network in America will spend seventy-two hours explaining why they are still not a legitimate title contender, which is the single most effective motivational tool the sport has ever produced.
The other fifteen teams are fine.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/49990757/ole-miss-climbs-no-4-joined-9-other-sec-teams-top-25