What is the projected top 25 in college football?

You set the first at the top and the twenty-fifth beneath, as if the kingdom were a ladder. I tell you, the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone - the one ranked last in your scrolls may be first at the wedding feast, and the mighty Georgia may find itself seated at the lowest place. Does a shepherd count his sheep by the honor of their fleece, or does he leave the ninety-nine to seek the one gone astray in the wilderness?

You rank men by the strength of their arms, but the scale that matters is weighed on a Day you do not see. The strong team that oppresses the weak, that takes what is not given, that boasts and forgets the poor - its first place is a debt it will answer for. Let the ranked be just in their dealings and humble in victory; the best among you is the one who serves, not the one who is served. God does not look at your polls; He looks at your hearts.

You cling to the order of names as though the names were permanent - but the season is impermanent, and so is every ranking, arising and passing like all compounded things. The craving for the first place is the craving that produces suffering; the team at twenty-fifth suffers no less than the team at first, for both are measured against a mark that shifts. Attend rather to how the contest is played: with effort rightly directed, without malice toward the fallen, without clinging to the victory once it has gone. The one who watches the game thus is freed from the scoreboard even while the scoreboard turns.

You set men in ranks of silver and gold, but the measure of a people is whether the stranger and the weak are dealt with justly within their gates. Let Georgia be first, if first they be - yet I say to you, a house divided against itself shall not stand, and a champion who grinds the lowly underfoot is no champion at all. Remember the years in the wilderness: it was not the swiftest tribe that entered the land, but the one that kept faith.

The superior man does not ask who stands first on the list, but whether each team has cultivated its own house. Georgia and Notre Dame may lead, yet a squad that neglects its young and honors only victory will fall like a house without a foundation. Let the coach govern by example, the elders mentor the freshmen, and the ritual of the season be observed - then harmony, not mere ranking, will follow.

You glory in your rankings, yet the first shall be last and the last first - this I know from a life spent in chains for a gospel that overturned every table of honor. What is Georgia to me, or Notre Dame, when the weak confound the strong and the foolish shame the wise? The scribes of your polls shall pass away; the love that binds twenty-five teams into one body shall not. Let your athletes run, but let them run as unto the Lord, and not for the praise of men.

A list of tribes and their champions, written in the sand by the desert wind, and tomorrow the wind will write it again. I left my father's house and every settled thing on a promise I could not see, and I say this: the name at the top is not the blessing - the covenant continues past the strong man to his children. Let them number their twenty-five; what endures is the faithfulness of the one who keeps His word.

The one at the top stands highest because the others have made a ladder for him; let him beware the ladder. A team that strives to be first sets itself against the current, and the current is patient and wears down the proudest dam. The wise coach empties his players of vanity, so they may move as water through the line, and he knows when to stop - the season will finish itself whether or not he names a champion in November.

One God made the quick and the slow, the first and the twenty-fifth, and no poll of scribes can divide them in His sight. A team that wins by pride and boasts in its ranking has earned a garland that withers; better is the squad that works honestly, feeds the hungry in its own town, and shares the ball as one shares bread with a stranger. What is Georgia's name worth if the man behind the scoreboard goes hungry, and what is a ball game if it does not teach us that all are brothers under the same sky?

In my husband Joseph's village they would not let a boy play in the courtyard if his father had no field, yet here a school named for a cold northern wind is lifted above the great houses of the south. The tall ones who boast of their arm and their gold shall be put down from their seats; the lowly, like those who labor at Wake Forest or SMU, shall be lifted up. Let them play, and let the proud remember whose stable the greatest of all was born in.

What is this but a new sale of indulgences? Men pay their gold to a school, the school buys the strongest bodies, and the scribes then declare it blessed with a number - and let any man who objects be told he is no true friend of the game. These are works-righteousness dressed in shoulder pads; no number voted by men can justify a single soul. Judge them by the game played honestly, and let the scribes keep their purgatory of rankings to themselves.

It seems we must distinguish: the ranking is not a thing in the teams, but a judgment in the mind of the voter, and judgments differ as the two published lists differ. Yet the games themselves are things, and the order of victories is real. So I answer that the projected order is true insofar as it conforms to the strength of the teams as known through their works, and false insofar as it rests on opinion alone - for as the Philosopher says, the measure of a thing is not the many who praise it but its own act.

Twenty-five teams, and behind each a crowd shouting for victory - but Our Lord does not ask who is first. A boy on the bench of Northwestern, at the bottom of the poll, is as dear to God as the quarterback at Georgia, and his small faithfulness in practice is worth more than a championship banner. If you want my ranking, put the forgotten ones first and the celebrated last; you will find them where the dying are, waiting for someone to sit with them.

Show me the law by which a squad rises or falls, and I will show you the hand of the Creator in it. Whatever the scribes of the press print, the true order is not in a poll but in the motion - the line that holds, the arm that throws true, the body that does not err. I feign no hypothesis as to the champion; I would have the observations, the yardage, the record of every contest, and from those deduce the certainty. They who rank by rumor and appetite measure the shadow, not the body.

You show me a list of twenty-five and call it a ranking, but I ask: by what clock do you measure them? The pollsters in Columbus and Athens weigh victories as if they were fixed rods, yet every Saturday the whole table bends - a team that was first in September lies unranked by November, and no one can say where the disturbance came from until it has already passed. The order is not in the names but in the relations between them; find the invariant, the thing that holds when all the shouting stops, and you will have the only ranking worth trusting.

Twenty-five, and I confess the list interests me chiefly as a record of descent with modification - programs that were mighty in my great-grandfather's day now struggle, and a Northwestern, which once would have been eaten alive, now holds its own among the old houses. Selection is at work here: the spread of the passing game, the migration of players from one school to another, the slow adaptation of those who cannot keep pace. I should want many seasons of careful observation before pronouncing on the topmost; but the tendency of all such tables to change, slowly and by small causes, is to me the most convincing evidence of all.

I would not trust a list drawn by men who never once looked through the glass at what the heavens actually do. Put these teams upon the field and measure - the yards gained, the points scored, the margin against common opponents - and the truth will out, as Jupiter's moons outed the Ptolemaic spheres. Indiana in the fifth seat and Northwestern in the twenty-fifth: let the ledger of the contests prove it, not the scribes' report.

I have long observed that men place the earth at the center when the simpler motion is elsewhere. So too with polls: they fix one team at the pivot and force all others into epicycles of explanation. Look rather to the season's own geometry - Georgia, Notre Dame, Miami, Ohio State - and ask which arrangement moves most harmoniously. The surest motion is not always the printed order.

Twenty-five teams, you say - I would transmit the whole ranking wirelessly to every village on earth, no cables, no cost, so that a boy in the Andes could see the score the instant it is made. The trouble with your polls is not the football but the friction: the waste, the wires, the men paid to argue. Give me a coil and a frequency and I will show you a stadium whose roar reaches the antipodes before the ball is snapped. The future does not rank; it broadcasts.

Twenty-five, and each week they reshuffle it - like atoms I watched in the dark chamber, invisible until something knocks them loose and they announce themselves. The selection is not a mystery to be feared, only a measurement to be taken carefully and revised when better data arrive. What I admire is the patience of it: a season is a long experiment, and only the final measurement means anything.

Show me the swabs from the helmets and I will show you the true ranking - the team that keeps its culture clean and its air fresh at practice outlasts the one with the finest plays on paper. You put your faith in a committee of writers; I put mine in the petri dish, where a single careless contagion spreads through a locker room faster than any rumor. The ranking is a hypothesis, gentlemen, and the bowl game is the experiment that decides it.

The top twenty-five isn't chosen by men thinking, it's chosen by men trying things and watching what happens - same as the lab. Georgia's where she is because somebody in Athens put in the reps, and I'd wager the twenty-fifth spot went to whichever program ran the most film and stayed stubborn through October. Genius in this business is one percent talent and ninety-nine percent showing up in the rain, and I'd bet a dime against a dollar that the rankings in December won't look a thing like the rankings today.

The interesting question is not who sits first but whether the ordering is even well-defined: with two reckoners, the Associated Press and the other, producing different lists from the same matches, you have not a ranking but two functions over the same domain disagreeing. I should like each voter's method made explicit - wins weighted how, margin how, strength of opponent how - and then we could ask whether the top seed is a stable fixed point of the computation or merely an accident of the initial ordering.

Give me a firm point - a stadium, a season, a fixed tally of victories - and I will move the whole ranking. But observe the difficulty: the voter weighs each match, and the weight depends on the rank of the opponent, and the rank of the opponent depends on the weight - a circle that will not close by any lever. Set the equations and solve them simultaneously, and you will find not one answer but a family of them, unless you first fix the weights by decree.

You hand me a list of twenty-five and call it a projection, yet no two chroniclers of the same week's play agree on the order - ESPN, you say, shuffles Northwestern to twentieth and drags Arizona in at two-and-twenty. That disagreement is itself the experiment: the thing being measured is not fixed, so the instruments quarrel. A team is like a current through iron filings - you cannot decree where the filings settle; you must observe the field and trust the pattern, week upon week, and even then a single Saturday may reverse a pole.

One notices the compilers cannot agree on the order of the last five - Northwestern, Arizona, Missouri, Oklahoma State, Wisconsin - and precisely at the uncertain margin you find the truth of the thing. The poll is a dream the public dreams each autumn: the same father-figures in the same bright uniforms, slain and resurrected weekly so that the crowd may discharge its aggression safely. What you call a projection is merely the wish, disguised as arithmetic, that the strong remain the strong.

Twenty-five universities in a queue, when the observable universe contains some two trillion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars - the numbers are, forgive me, modest. Still, I am pleased your species can rank at all; it suggests the calculating faculty survives. The real question is not who stands at one and who at twenty-five, but whether a civilization that devotes such arithmetic to a leather ball will apply the same rigor to the asteroid that could erase the entire poll, along with the voters and the stadiums.

Observe what your two lists actually do: they are two different computations upon the same raw data, and the differences - Northwestern at twenty versus twenty, Arizona appearing and vanishing - expose the hidden rules of each compiling engine. Give me the votes as punched cards and I could write you an engine to tally them, and it would not merely count but weigh: a team's history, its margin, the strength of those it has beaten. The machine would not tell you who is best; it would tell you precisely what your own rules imply, which is a different and more honest thing.

Before a projection can be proved, one must set down the definitions: what is a team, what is a victory, and by what common measure two victories are compared. Without such axioms the pollsters each assume different first principles - ESPN and the Associated Press, as you report, begin from unstated and differing premises - and so arrive at differing conclusions that are each internally blameless. Give me the premises plainly stated and I shall demonstrate the ordering; but there is no royal road to the true ranking, and no shortcut past the definitions.

A list of names without a single measure of yards gained, of points scored against, of men lost to injury - that is a rumor, not a report. I would have every team's record kept in columns, the wins and the defeats set side by side as I set the deaths by disease beside the deaths by sword, and then we should see plainly which of these twenty-five is truly the strongest rather than the most spoken of. Send me the figures and I will tell you the truth of it.

A list of twenty-five? I would not be content with twenty-five - I would take the whole field and fuse it into one host, as I joined Macedonian and Persian at Opis. Give me Georgia and Notre Dame in the same phalanx, and let them learn to march under one standard. The men who chase a single crown from September to January are my kin; the rest are garrison troops counting their walls.

Twenty-five names, and not one of them has yet crossed a river to meet the others - the poll is a census of reputations, not of legions. Georgia sits first on the strength of old victories, as Pompey sat on the strength of old triumphs, and we know how that ended. Send Georgia south to play at Bryant-Denny in November, send Notre Dame into the cold of a night game at Iowa, and the table will scatter like Gauls before the cavalry. Fortune favors the bold schedule; the timid schedule is a man who builds no camp and wonders why he is ambushed.

A school of chariots, this - and no fewer than the eastern provinces in it. I count Georgia and Notre Dame at the fore, tangled as Antony and Octavian were, and mark you, it is Indiana and BYU in the top ten that would have astonished any soothsayer at Alexandria. Were I seeding this field for my own advantage, I would marry my grain fleet to Georgia's line and let the inland desert schools quarrel over scraps.

A ranking is a senate: it endures only if the provinces consent to it and the traditions that seat men are respected. Georgia at the head is well enough, but mark how the inland and western schools crowd the middle - give them their dignity and their place, or they will find another champion, as my legions found another Caesar when Rome forgot them. Patience, precedent, and a firm hand on the frontier: thus is a season, like an empire, kept.

A ranking is a census of tents before the battle. I do not ask who is numbered first; I ask who rides, who obeys, and who brings back the horses. Georgia may camp at the head of the column, but let her scouts be lazy and her archers squabble, and the horde behind her will trample her. Strength is measured in the field, not in the scribe's ledger.

Rankings are merely the map of the battlefield before the cannons speak. Georgia holds the high ground at number one - good; let them hold it, for a position is nothing without the will to defend it, and I have seen Austerlitz won by men who were outnumbered on paper. I would march Indiana, that upstart at five, straight at Notre Dame at two and see what their scribes say by morning. Fortune favors the bold, and polls favor the timid. Give me a corps of athletes and a general's eye, and I would rewrite this table by December.

When I was a young man surveying the frontier, I learned that a chain of posts is only as strong as its farthest link, and a list of twenty-five colleges is a like chain. Georgia may hold the first post, but the Republic of sport is well served when Indiana and Northwestern - quiet provinces, never once mistaken for the capital - stand high in their own right. Let each mind its own discipline and not the vanity of the ranking, and the whole shall prosper.

A poll in November is a weather report on a prairie - the skies may turn before supper. I have seen a house divided against itself lose to a team with nothing but grit and a good coach, and I have seen a front-runner fall because one man's pride outran his judgment. What matters is not the order men set them in today, but whether each team holds to the thing it was built for - and whether the voters remember that a game, like a nation, must be of the people and for them, or it will not last.

The first of November is not the end of the campaign, it is the moment before the guns open on the long winter offensive, and any general who thinks a November dispatch decides the war has never read history. Georgia holds the high ground, but the high ground is a place to be besieged from; Notre Dame, Miami, Ohio State - these are armies waiting on the flanks, and the polls are merely the communiqués of the moment. Never, never, never surrender the ball to complacency, and let us see who is still standing in the mud when January comes.

Twenty-five names, and every one of them a school where young men are taught to hurl themselves at one another for the applause of a crowd. I would not forbid their play - let them run and struggle, it is honest enough - but I would ask whether the same zeal and the same money go into the studies of those same young men, and into the villages where they were born. The true contest is not on the field but in whether the strong use their strength for the weak.

A quarter of a hundred names, and I look first not at Georgia at the top but at who is missing from the list and who is present, and ask what gates and what wages decide such things. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends - and it bends in the counting of who gets the coach, the field, the scholarship, and the cheering, and who is left to watch. Let the beloved community reach the end zone together, or the victory will be a hollow one.

Twenty-five names, and eleven of them - Miami, Alabama, Ole Miss, Kentucky, Mississippi State, Tennessee, Missouri, Texas - I can read like a map of old quarrels, though I shall not strain the figure. What strikes me is that a ranking is a ladder, and ladders have always been used by small men to look down on others. The true test of a team, as of a nation, is not where it stands in November but whether the boys it lifted from the dust stay standing when the season turns. Rank no one so high that you forget the boy who was never given a field to play on.

The list shows eleven Southern and border programs ranked and not a single great industrial city of the North among them - the whole theater has been surrendered to the old agrarian interests. A nation that outsources its sport to such regions has lost its discipline and its will. Competition must be organized, subordinated to a single purpose and a single authority, or it dissolves into the squabbling of the pollsters. These rankings are the natural product of a system that rewards advertisement over strength.

Twenty-five names, and not one word of which class owns the stadiums, pays the coaches, and pockets the broadcast gold while the players break their bodies for a scholarship. The rankings are a diversion manufactured to keep the workers arguing about Georgia and Notre Dame instead of asking who profits. A disciplined organization does not publish a list for the amusement of the masses; it organizes, it counts its cadres, and it acts. The cadres here are the players, and they have not yet been organized.

Two rival lists, published in the same week, disagreeing - this is not confusion but the very condition of the thing: competing organs of opinion each claiming authority over the same question. The question is not which list is correct but who controls the printing of it. A vanguard does not wait for the vote to settle; it seizes the press and the stadium and declares the question decided. Until the players control the means of the game, all these rankings are merely the handbills of the owners.

Look at Georgia at the top - the same few lords of the gridiron again and again, while Indiana and Northwestern, the poor peasants of this sport, must claw their way up from the bottom of the field and are never given the land they till. This ranking is a tally kept by the landlords' own stewards, published in their papers to flatter themselves. Let the masses mobilize, let every region have its own team, and let the strongest not be decided by a committee in a warm room but by struggle on the field.

One does not govern an empire by the opinion of the morning paper. To set a college in Indiana above a college in Alabama on the word of some committee is precisely the sort of disorderly presumption I have spent a lifetime resisting. Let each institution know its duty, keep its record honestly, and be judged by it - and let the sovereign's peace, not the sporting page, decide what is respectable.

I have seen many such lists come and go, and the names at the top change less than the weather. What matters is not the ranking but the constancy with which these young men and their coaches keep to their duty, week after week, in victory and in defeat alike. One wishes them well, quietly, and trusts that the game, like the crown, endures.

Twenty-five dukedoms of the field, and not one of them bound by a common law or a common faith! I would have a single calendar of contests, a single set of rules, and a council of wise men to keep the records, so that the strongest might be known and honored as the strongest, and the weaker instructed and raised up. Order in all things, and the realm of the sport will flourish as the realm of Christendom once did.

The voices told me nothing of Georgia or Notre Dame, and I will not pretend to know what heaven thinks of a football match. But I know this: the men of Indiana and Northwestern, whom the learned lords of the list put low, may yet ride higher than all of them, for God does not weigh men by the reckonings of committees. Let them fight with clean hearts and the victory will be given where it is given.

I have no windows into the souls of these twenty-five colleges, nor any wish to make them - let each play as its conscience and its conference direct. But mark how the list-maker shifts Northwestern from five-and-twenty to twenty at a breath: such is the flattery of printers. A queen learns to trust the ledger of her own exchequer above the gossip of the court, and so should a sportsman trust the scoreboard above the headline.

How charming - a league of little republics, each with its own colors and its own pride, and yet all of them begging the favor of a committee in a warm room. I should have them all at my court and rank them by the lands and revenues they command, as I rank my own provinces; but since they will not have an empress, let them at least have the good sense to win their games and let the ranking follow. Indiana at five is a pleasant surprise; I do like an upstart.

A wise king does not scorn the customs of the lands he holds, and a wise list does not scorn the teams of the far provinces. Let Georgia and Notre Dame be honored, but let BYU and Boise State and Houston keep their own customs and their own pride, and be judged fairly by their deeds. Magnanimity in the ranking wins loyalty; contempt breeds rebellion.

Even among rivals, honor is owed. I would not have the committee slight a worthy foe for the sake of a familiar name; let Indiana and Northwestern be given their due, as I gave mine to the Franks when they fought well. A ranking that is just in victory is a ranking that will be respected in defeat, and the game, like the holy city, is best held by those who treat their opponents fairly.

Tell me - when you say the first is Georgia, do you mean they are the best, or only that men believe them best? And what is this 'best' you speak of: the swiftest feet, the strongest arm, the largest crowd, or something else entirely? I confess I know nothing of this game; so let us inquire together, and perhaps we shall find that the city which crowns its champions has not yet asked what a champion is for.

You ask me to name the twenty-five, but observe what a strange thing you have done: you have taken the shadow and asked which shadows are best. Each autumn these teams are assembled, ranked, dissolved, and assembled again, and no two seasons agree - this is the world of becoming, where opinion touches opinion and calls it truth. Behind it stands the Form of the excellent contest: the harmony in which each part - the line, the back, the discipline of the coach - does its own work and does not meddle with the others. The team that most nearly imitates that harmony is first, whether or not the scribes see it; the rest are prisoners in a cave, mistaking the shadows on the wall for the game itself.

To rank is to classify, and classification demands a criterion - yet men here rank by repute and rumor, not by cause. What is the purpose of a team? To win; but a team's virtue lies in the mean between reckless spectacle and timid safety, and the wise judge weighs schedule, circumstance, and the excellence of the opponent. Give me the evidence of the contests themselves, and I will tell you who is first; until then, such a list is opinion dressed as knowledge.

Before we rank a single school, ask: could I will that every tally, from the Atlantic coast to the western plains, be judged by the same impartial rule? A team that wins by fortune and not by disciplined execution earns no moral desert, whatever the scribes write. The poll is mere inclination; the season's play is duty. Let each squad answer for its own conduct, and the ordering will take care of itself.

And what is this list but the herd's bleating, each beast pressing to stand nearest the shepherd's pen? Georgia, Notre Dame, Miami - the rabble chants its order and calls it truth. I ask instead: which team has the strength to create its own measure, to affirm the contest without begging a number's blessing? The rest is slave morality with a scoreboard.

Twenty-five names, and behind every one a ledger of gate receipts, television contracts, and the labor of young men whose bodies are consumed for the profit of a few. The ranking is not a measure of sporting excellence; it is the price the owners set on their merchandise. Ask who built these stadiums, who tends the turf, who is paid nothing while the coach is paid millions - there you will find the true class struggle in cleats. The question is not who is first, but who owns the means of playing.

Before I grant that Georgia is first, I must ask what it is to be first - is it a number in a poll, a thing the senses report and the mind may doubt? Strip away the pollsters, the commentators, the inherited opinion, and what remains certain is only this: a game is played, a score is kept, and a result stands, clear and distinct. From that firm ground, and no higher, let them rank as they please.

Rankings are the incense burned before the altar of opinion, and the wise prince knows opinion is a currency to be spent, not believed. Georgia sits at the top because the voters fear to move them; Notre Dame is second because her name carries weight beyond her record - a name, mind you, is a fortress if the walls are kept. If I coached the tenth, I would not whine about the poll; I would schedule the third, beat them on their own field, and let the writers explain it in the morning.

All the autumn world's a stage, and these five-and-twenty are its players - some cast as kings in September, some as fools by November, and the plot rewritten each Saturday by a single dropped ball. Georgia wears the crown, but crowns sit light on heads that must defend them weekly; the twenty-fifth, poor Northwestern, may yet play the dagger in the last act. What's in a ranking? A name; and a name that shifts like the wind off the lake.

Sing, O Muse, of the shifting order of the autumn hosts, of Georgia the proud and Notre Dame the storied, of Indiana who rose from the dust like a man the gods have favored late. Great is the glory of the first name on the scroll, yet glory is a wind that scatters chaff - remember how Troy stood tallest in the song before the horse was wheeled within her gates. Fate weighs the helmeted men of Tuscaloosa and the Trojans of the West alike, and no poll foretells which champion shall be laid low by a single evening's wrath among the rain and the roaring stands.

I have seen this ordering before - the proud at the summit and the humble pressed low, and I tell you the wheel turns. Georgia sits in the first circle like a city secure in its walls, yet pride goeth before the fall, and I have walked the terraces where the mighty are set beneath the lowly. Let Notre Dame and Miami take heed, for the bowl of divine justice mixes the standings as Fortune mixes the lots.

In my youth I watched students duel with foils in Jena, and the finest fencer was not the one who thrust fastest but the one who grew through every bout. So with these young men on the field: a Georgia, a Notre Dame - fine specimens, but whoever merely repeats his form has ceased to strive. Let the season be a long education, and let us praise the team still becoming over the team already arrived.

Twenty-five knights errant in armor of crimson and gold, and not one of them can tell you why the wind blows him east instead of west. The keepers of the lists scribble their rankings on Monday and tear them up by Saturday, like a barber who shaves one side and forgets the other. I have seen madmen in cages with more settled opinions than these polls. Still, let them tilt at each other - the dust they raise is honest, even if the heralds are not.

I confess I do not understand this game of armored men chasing an oval ball, yet I understand the fever that surrounds it: the same fever that made men cheer Napoleon's cavalry and then weep over the bodies. What troubles me is not who is ranked first, but that thousands will spend their Sunday shouting at a field while the bread is unbaked and the neighbor is unvisited. If one of those young men at the top of the list would refuse the glory and give his strength to the poor, that would be a ranking worth recording.

Rank them, yes - but look at the faces in the crowd, the father who has drunk away his week hoping his son's team will win, the boy who prays for a victory as if it were salvation, the coach who believes his system will save him. This poll is only a mirror held up to our hunger for order, and behind it the abyss grins. I should like to see Georgia win, and then see what her victory does to the soul of the man who needed it too much.

One must allow that a ranking is a little like a ball at an assembly - the gentlemen stand about and declare who is handsomest, and the lady knows perfectly well which of them has neither fortune nor sense. The team at the top, like a man with ten thousand a year, may be admired without being loved; the one at twenty-five may have more true spirit and only a poor schedule to show for it. I confess I would rather see a modest club win by good management and steady nerves than a proud one strut to the title on the strength of its name.

For my part, I confess a fondness for the fellows at Northwestern - a name that once meant little more than a cold wind off the lake, and now sits among the mighty by dint of nothing but honest toil. And the poor devils at Kentucky and Mississippi State, scratching their way upward like clerks hoping for a crust - heaven knows who counts their victories, but I would wager some dry steward in a counting-house does, and would sell the whole lot of them for a shilling if the ledger demanded it.

Twenty-five teams, and I notice the voters at one journal put Northwestern at twenty and the voters at another put it at twenty - which is to say they agree so hard they disagree, like two deacons counting the same collection plate. I have seen a good deal of human certainty in my time, and it has almost always been arithmetic done by a man who wanted a particular answer. The teams will settle it on the field soon enough; the voters never do.

Georgia at the top, Northwestern at twenty-fifth. A man can respect Northwestern. No great names, no promises, just work, week after week, in the cold. That is the whole thing. You line up, you do the job, you take the hit and you get up. The rankings are talk. The game is what is real.

I should want to see the thing with my own eyes before I believe the list - the arc of the thrown ball, the strain in the line, the crowd as it breaks like water against a wall. Look how the body twists to throw, the hip and shoulder turning as a millstone turns, and the ball loosed like a stone from a sling. A painted order on paper is nothing; nature's order is in the motion, and I would sketch it a hundred times before I set a number beside a name.

Twenty-five blocks of rough stone, and men already carve names upon them before the chisel has touched. You wish the finished David before the marble is even chosen - I know this error well, for I have lain under a ceiling four years with paint dripping into my eyes, and no one could tell me what the vault would be until the last prophet's hand was freed from the plaster. The true form is inside these teams; it is not in the poll. Let them be struck hard by worthy opponents, as the mallet strikes the block, and only then see what figure the season liberates from the excess.

Ah, but look at Indiana - fifth in all the land, a field of common men suddenly blazing like a wheatfield at Arles at noon! I do not care for the tally half so much as the color of it: the crowd in the cold, the roar, the sweat on a boy's face when the autumn light falls gold across the stadium. Paint me that, and let the scribes keep their numbers.

Bah - you want me to copy the list as though it were a photograph! I do not paint what the pollster sees, I break it. Give me a Georgia and a Notre Dame and I will show you their faces from six angles at once, the lineman's jaw and the quarterback's eye in the same plane, until the ranking means nothing and the struggle means everything. Order is for museums.

You ask me to name the finest, and I tell you: come back at four o'clock when the light falls slantwise across the grass in Bloomington and I will give you a different answer, and again at dusk. The poll is a photograph of a river. Those fellows at the top - Georgia, Notre Dame - they are only the brightest patch of water at this instant, and the instant does not hold still for the scribblers. What I would paint is not the ranking but the fog rolling off the field at dawn, before anyone has decided who is beautiful.

You hand me a list of names and ask me to rank them - but a ranking is only a surface, like the gilt on an Amsterdam frame. I would paint these young men by a single candle, their faces half-lit, helmets under the arm, and watch what the shadow reveals: who wears victory with humility and who wears it like a mask. The light does not lie, and neither does the face of a man who has just lost.

Every week they paint their little chart and shuffle the names like cards, and I would not give a fig for the numbers - but give me the ones who climb out of nowhere, bruised and defiant, and I will paint them. Indiana and Northwestern standing up where nobody expected them: that is a self-portrait I understand, the plain face that refuses to stay in the back of the room. Let them rank me last; I will still be looking straight ahead, with the monkey on my shoulder and a cigarette in my hand.

Ha! Twenty-five names, and not one of them a decent melody. Give me a stadium that sings in key, a band that knows when to be silent, a crowd that roars on the downbeat - that is worth more than any poll. Georgia first, Notre Dame second - very well, but I would set them to a fugue and see which holds the theme without breaking. The rest is noise, my friends, and noise wants only a good conductor.

Ha! A list! As if a ranking could be written before the music is played - you do not judge the symphony from the tuning of the instruments. Georgia and Ohio State stand at the top like two themes stated boldly at the opening, and every fool nods as though the finale were known; but the score turns, the key darkens, a Northwestern or a Wake Forest seizes the melody when the great houses falter. This is the whole joy of it: that the spirit breaks through where the score said it could not, and the crowd rises as one - that is the brotherhood I set to music, and it costs a team a lost Saturday to earn it.

Twenty-five voices, and every one must find its place in the choir or the whole fugue collapses into noise. A ranking is but a subject and its countersubject - each team a line that must answer the others in order, or the harmony breaks. I would set Georgia as the cantus firmus and let the rest enter, each in its turn, and judge them not by the loudness of their entrance but by whether they keep the measure.

Well, sir, I'll tell you what - down in Memphis we didn't much care for polls, we cared whether the room shook. Georgia at the top, Notre Dame right behind, that's fine and good, but any one of those boys can light up a Saturday night if his heart's in it. Lord, I've seen a no-name band outplay the headliner more than once. It's the feel, honey, not the standings.

Heh-hee - I love the boys in the helmets, I really do. They dance before they hit, you know? The whole stadium rising like one heartbeat, strangers holding hands - that's the dream, that's healing, that's what I try to do with a song and a spin. Rankings - mmm - they put a number on joy, and joy doesn't like numbers. But I'll say this: when Georgia and Notre Dame meet, I want to see them moonwalk into that end zone.

Twenty-five names in a row - we could write a song for every one of them, and a few could use a better tune! Georgia at the top, sure, but give a little love to Indiana and Northwestern, the lads nobody expects to be in the room; the best songs always come from somewhere you weren't looking. All you need is a good quarterback and a bit of imagination - and imagine all the Georgia fans, living in fear of the upset!

There's a list that comes out every week and they shuffle the names like a deck of cards in a riverboat town, and you can put Georgia at the top until the sun goes down, but the road to the end is paved with highway patrolmen and bad coffee and a left tackle who never got a proper breakfast. I knew a boy once who could throw a football through a tire swing from forty yards and nobody ranked him at all. The tally's for the men in the press box; the game's for the ones who can't stop playing it.

I have written songs about the one who's not on the list and knows they belong there, and let me tell you, the tenth-ranked team is the most dangerous team in the country - they've got a chip on their shoulder and a long season of receipts. The voters put Georgia first, and good for Georgia, but the story of the year is whoever's at twenty-three and still getting up at five in the morning for the walk-on reps. Somebody in that locker room is going to own this whole thing by December, and I hope they get to keep the trophy with their own name on it.

I have sailed west against every learned man's counsel, and found a world they swore was not there - so do not tell me a list is fixed. The Indies lay hidden beyond the horizon, and so does the champion; the men of the press reckon by what they have seen, but the map is not the sea. Give me a fair wind, a staunch ship, and a crew that does not mutiny by the third loss, and I will find you the top of the table where no one thought to look.

You would have me swear the twenty-five before the caravans have even set out! I have stood in Khanbaliq and heard merchants foretell the price of silk by the phase of the moon, and I learned to trust only what my own eyes counted at the end of the road. Indiana at the fifth - that is a wonder like the salt springs of the western country, a thing I should not believe unless I had seen it with my own eyes, and yet I might. Ask me again in November, when the teams have crossed their deserts and the tolls are truly paid.

A league table is a chart of waters not yet sailed, and I have seen too many maps promise a strait that proved only fog and mutiny. Georgia and Notre Dame stand at the harbor mouth, but the season is a long crossing, and the fleet that holds its course through the cold October gales - not the one nearest port at the outset - reaches the Spice Isles. Mark the inland schools, BYU and Utah, who must cross strange seas with no friendly wind, and see who still stands at the end.

Georgia number one, Notre Dame two - but I float like a butterfly, so I don't read the paper, I read the man across the line. You can rank a team by a scribe's pen, but the only poll that counts is the one on the field when the whistle blows, and I've seen the top man fall. So keep your list; I'll keep my hands up and my eyes on the prize.

Twenty-five teams, and every one of them certain the sky will fall if they slip a notch - I've seen that look in a cockpit at ten thousand feet, and it never helped anybody. The poll is just a weather report; you fly through the storm, you don't argue with the gauge. What interests me is Indiana at five and Northwestern at twenty-five - those are the ones who took off from a short field and climbed anyway. That's the spirit that gets you across an ocean.

From above, there is no number beside any of them - only the bright thread of the Earth and a crowd of young men chasing a leather ball, and never have I seen so many hands reaching at once. In my pod I was alone, and still every flight belongs to all of us; so it is with this. Georgia's name is first, but the championship belongs to whoever works hardest in the long days when nobody is watching - as our engineers did, quietly, before anyone clapped.

Twenty-five teams is twenty-five too many - that's the problem. The best programs, the ones that matter, are the ones that say no to everything that isn't the thing itself; the rest are just feature-bloat. Georgia and Notre Dame aren't winning because they have more - they're winning because they're ruthlessly focused on the few things that move the needle. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and a poll with Northwestern at twenty-fifth is a product nobody designed.

Rankings like this are basically a lagging indicator - you're measuring reputation, not performance, and the error bars are enormous. First principles: what actually predicts a title is recruiting talent, transfer-portal churn, and schedule difficulty, so build the model from those inputs and let the poll catch up. Also, college football has a playoff now, so the regular season is a qualifying round - stop optimizing for a beauty contest and optimize for getting in and peaking in December. And honestly, the whole thing should be a single global league with promotion and relegation; the current structure is bureaucratic inertia dressed up as tradition.

Oh, I love this - because every one of these young men has a story, and the number beside the name never tells it. Indiana at five! Somebody's son who was told he was too small, and now the whole country is watching him on a Saturday. What I know for sure is that a ranking is a snapshot, not a sentence - you get to decide what you do with the next play, and that is where the real living happens.

Georgia first, Notre Dame second, and me? I'm the greatest, so I'd be zero - unranked, because I don't need their poll to know my worth. The question is not who sits atop the list but who stands when the list is tested. I've been the underdog and the champion both, and I'll tell you: the ranking is the pen, the fight is the man.

Ah, my friend, a ranking is like a scoreboard before the whistle - it tells you nothing about the heart of the boy who will run until his legs forget they are tired. I came from nothing, barefoot on the dirt, and no list ever put me first until I made them put me there. Georgia, Notre Dame, Miami - fine names, fine shirts. But the beautiful game, whatever the ball, belongs to the one who plays with joy. I would pay to watch Indiana, honestly - fifth! Who expected that? That is the beautiful game.

Well now, if you're going to rank them, rank them the way I'd storyboard it - give me the heroes and the underdogs! Indiana at five and Northwestern creeping up the list, that's a picture worth drawing, a team nobody believed in climbing out of the shadows. You can have your Georgia and Notre Dame; I'll take the little fellow with the big dream, because that's the story the whole family will stay to see.