Sports
Florida Is Back In The Top Ten And Ole Miss Is Why
By Michael Yappaport, . BSN Network. Satire.
The college football rankings released this week contain two facts that cannot both be true at the same time, and yet here we are.
Florida is in the top ten. Florida got there by beating Ole Miss. Ole Miss is also ranked. Nobody at CBS Sports has explained this and nobody will.
The Gators blew out the Rebels in a performance described by Florida head coach Billy Napier as "a complete team effort in all three phases," which is coach-speak for "we had a big lead by halftime and I stopped calling anything interesting." Florida is now a top-ten program. Ole Miss made them one. Pick your interpretation.
Meanwhile Georgia is now close enough to No. 1 Texas that the Longhorns have to be aware of it, the way you become aware of someone standing slightly too close to you in an elevator. Neither team has done anything wrong exactly. They are just both very good and the sport only has one top spot, which someone is going to have to explain to Georgia's recruiting coordinator who has apparently been telling prospects they already have it.
Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers, asked about Georgia closing the gap, said the team was "focused on ourselves and what we can control," which is what a quarterback says when his coach told him to say nothing and he still wanted to say something. Kirby Smart, coaching the Bulldogs from a sideline that has been technically under construction since 2022, offered that "rankings are just a snapshot," a sentence that has been said by every coach sitting in second place since rankings were invented.
Here is my problem with all of it. We spent the whole offseason being told that the SEC was Texas-Georgia and everybody else was playing for a third-place ribbon. Florida was not in that conversation. Florida was the team people mentioned when they were listing programs that needed to rebuild trust, which is what you say when you mean they lost games they should not have lost to people whose mascots are birds.
Now Florida beats Ole Miss badly enough to climb into the top ten and we are supposed to treat this as a revelation. I am not treating it as a revelation. I am treating it as evidence that the committee needs a longer memory and Ole Miss needs a longer offseason.
The actual number one situation is genuinely interesting and I am annoyed by that because it means I have to pay attention to Georgia, which I was trying to avoid. The Bulldogs have a defense that functions like an HOA for opposing offenses: everything gets flagged, nothing gets approved, and someone is always standing in your driveway with a clipboard. Texas is better than that on most days. Most days is not every day.
Florida will be fine until they play someone who is also trying.
Ole Miss is ranked.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/cbs-sports-138-college-football-rankings-florida-georgia-texas/