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This is Dog Nation Daily, the daily podcast for Georgia Bulldogs fame.

Here's your host, Brandon Adam.

For a long time, the Associated Press poll was a very big part of the overall college football story.

In fact, even in our lifetime, you want to go back to the sort of previous era of the sport, BCS, back in the late 90s, early 2000s.

The AP poll was a main component of the formula for how you played for the national championship.

So we have lived in a time in which the preseason Associated Press Bowl is a very big deal because it was one of the building blocks for how you'd eventually win a national championship.

And being number one in the AP poll essentially was the national championship for a long time,

kind of prior to that. The AP poll has had huge

importance in the sport, even though if you want to go back to ancient times, it was clearly

biased against the Southern and SEC teams. Nonetheless, it was always a very important

part of the college football story. It seems like in the age in which we live now, in the final year,

the 14th playoff, looking ahead to kind of future playoff expansion even two, the AP poll is somewhat

less important because it's not an official part of anybody's formula anymore. And yet I still think

it really matters because it's like one of the things we've had for the longest. It's one of the

ways in which we kind of compare seasons across time. And frankly, it becomes a very interesting comparison at the beginning of the year to the end of the year for the simple fact that we, and I don't vote in the AP poll. They don't let people like me do things like that. But all the media types of the most part, we just have a tendency to get things very, very wrong in ways that can't be foreseen at the beginning of the year, but at the end of the year, we almost always get things wrong in sort of a similar pattern, it seems anyway. And so from that standpoint, I'm just sort of fascinated by this. You've heard me say this a million times in the past, and I believe it's one of the truest things about the sport we all love college football. It is very easy to project, but very difficult to predict.

What I mean is if I gave you a blank sheet of paper and said, hey, give me the top 25.

And I gave somebody in, you know, Eugene Oregon, chance of the same thing.

Oftentimes our top 25s are all going to kind of look the same at the beginning of the season. There's a certain logic that sort of says, well, this team on paper would appear to be better than this team. And, you know, we can kind of project who kind of should be in the preseason top 25. And for the most part, as we kind of, you know, flow along the season, we'll be kind of directionally accurate on that, that it's sort of obvious at first blush to say, well, this category of team is clearly way better than the rest of the country. And for the most part, we'll be directionally accurate on that. But if I said, okay, now drill down to the sort of specific granular detail and now tell me who the best of all is, and then tell me who's going to be second, tell me he's going to be third, and kind of start stacking them that way. We may be directionally accurate, but we are never going to be specifically accurate. If we were, we'd all be rich. That's true for the stock market, college football, you know, pick them contests or anything else that if we could get that specific with accuracy, then we'd be the richest people in the world. All of us would be because there's money to be made from being right on predictions, but college football has a way of sort of staying a step ahead or a step ahead or two even anyway of the predictions that we want to make. And I'm fascinated by that. It brings me back every single year. It's just really, really good drama. I just love it. And I love it when my team's at the top, but I still

kind of love it even going back years as much as that wasn't the case. It's just fun to be

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