Ohio State entered the 2014 season ranked 5th in the country.
Before you allow but preseason polls are bad, actually to escape from the part of your frontal lobe where you house all of your scorching takes - let's talk about why these rankings are uniquely important to how college football in particular colors in the stories of its chapters.
Preseason and even early season-slotting may not impact postseason destinations but they still matter because this sport is played by teens and young adults who make the trivial indispensable. Rankings are also exploited by coaches who play polls to their competitive advantage, portraying themselves and their adversaries on opposites sides of an imaginary overrated/underrated line.
We talk about each season decades after the fact through the artificial lens of expectations that were either failed or exceeded. Preseason polls shape how that's all documented years after the fact. This isn't professional hockey or Iron Chef.
In 2016 black-striped helmets are barely outnumbered.
We celebrate every week hedging and speculating as futures traders for all of these teams, each given an arbitrary stock price before they play a single game. Bitching about rankings is a large part of the reason we enjoy college football so much.
Alright, good, we all agree now. Let's venture back to late August 2014.
A very young Ohio State team abruptly found itself without the services of its Heisman candidate QB for the entire season, which had not yet begun. It's ranked 5th in the polls that preceded this setback. That ranking had been based on two ingredients: Urban Meyer and Braxton Miller. The ehh it's Ohio State everything should fall into place factor temporarily helped to keep that ranking buoyant.
Miller was one of five team captains chosen by Meyer. The other four were seniors; a 2nd team All-B1G defensive tackle and three undecorated players including a 5-star bust (by the way, Recruiting Rankings are basically Preseason Polls but for individual players' college careers. Makes you think).
All of Ohio State's 2013 headliners were now gone. They were replaced by a whole bunch of new faces; mostly sophomores. We had several lofty precedents to look back to for guidance, most recently with the 2007 Buckeyes who filled as many holes but still ended up back in the BCS title game. They opened the season #10, coming off nine months of highlights from the most damaging loss in program history.
The 1999 Buckeyes opened at #9 and tried to reload but failed to even reach bowl eligibility, finishing with a losing record. A funny thing about that forgettable season - despite being mediocre all year Ohio State was still ranked 25th on its Senior Day. Voters kept waiting for the team they originally expected prior to Labor Day to arrive up until Thanksgiving. In the meantime, it lost seven times!
Preseason voters believe this young Ohio State team is the best in the Big Ten, a conference it has only won once since 2009.
So the 2014 Buckeyes opened their season with a 34-17 win over Navy in Baltimore, which provided futures traders with their first opportunity to drop them (from 5th to 8th) for not having Miller anymore. Losing to Virginia Tech the following Saturday sent them tumbling to 22nd. Beating Kent State the following Saturday 66-0 did not affect their ranking at all.
In real-time it felt like a slight. However, that ranking had everything to do with games that had not been played yet by players that were still difficult to identify without program. The Virginia Tech and No Braxton Miller refrain hung around their necks like an albatross. For weeks.
They marched on, winning each Saturday and slowly clawing their way back into the teens, but then Ohio State stayed stuck at #13 for four straight polls. This came just one season after the Buckeyes had gone undefeated the first 13 weeks of the season - on a 24-game winning streak overall - and were rewarded with a ranking two spots below where they began.
Winning never felt more like running in place than it did in 2012 [postseason ban] and 2013 [beating up a bunch of bad teams]. So the animus and frustration that powered the 2014 Buckeyes - who were still stuck in Hokie purgatory when they visited East Lansing that season - had been accumulating at the Woody for years. Not weeks.
History, preseason expectations and that loss on September 6 shaped the perception beyond anything Ohio State did on the field into November, as if to say winning is fine but we had originally expected you to be better than this. Without delving back into details you're already taking with you to your grave, the Buckeyes smacked around a parade of ranked teams as underdogs and all of a sudden they're on the coveted side of the overrated/underrated line once again.
The anchor that had kept the Buckeyes from moving up in the polls served as the fuel that no practice, drills or a horde of 5-star athletes cannot provide a team. It was that juice that the followup to 2014 was sorely missing for most of last season.
That brings us back to right now: Ohio State is your preseason #5 team once again. Urban, a veteran quarterback and the ehh it's the Buckeyes everything should fall into place factors return once more while most of last year's contributors do not. That catastrophic self-inflicted loss to Michigan State carrying over to be fuel for this season has about the same chance of success as the 2013 loss to the Spartans did while Virginia Tech was leaving Columbus with a two-touchdown win.
The eventual national champions, ranked #22.
Our convenient parallels to the championship run of 2014 with this season have some new obstacles, namely the upgraded equity gained by the conference during that span - largely Ohio State's doing - along with East Lansing solidifying itself as a reliable challenger and Michigan's most earnest attempt yet to recapture its 20th century competence.
Futures traders believe these Buckeyes are better than both Michigan teams and the rest of the Big Ten - a conference it has only won once since 2009. This is by far the youngest team it has fielded in that span. But preseason rankings aren't about right now; they never have been. College football colors in the stories of its chapters using these prognostications as guidance, and that guidance in turn is influenced by the history they were complicit in shaping. Preseason polls and the story of this sport have always had a symbiotic relationship.
This youthful Buckeye team is talented as hell, equally mysterious and ranked 5th once again despite strong but decidedly mixed outcomes of late. But there's very little these voters can find to convince them to bet against Ohio State's future - so they're going to keep on doing it, team unseen. And we're going to keep hoping they're right.
