Who’s in third?

I believe that Nelly had it right when he once proposed that “…Two is not a winner, three… I believe that Nelly had it right when he once proposed that “…Two is not a winner, three nobody remembers.” In the world of college football, though, where who is No. 2 is usually more hotly contested than who is No. 1, I’d have to say he got it wrong.

In less than two weeks, the Bowl Championship Series, the be- and end-all of ambiguity in college football, will release its first set of standings for this season. From here, teams will spend the next seven weeks jockeying for position in said standings, looking to parlay a strong season into a big payday, namely a spot in one of the five BCS big-money Bowls.

The very idea of computers trying to figure out our national champions is as laughable as a home game against The Citadel, but the fact remains that this isn’t going to change. Rather than a sensible, four-team playoff, the NCAA seems intent on letting controversy engulf the sport every single December, when somebody gets left out because the team’s conference isn’t flashy enough or it didn’t beat Temple convincingly enough to move ahead one spot in the polls.

Just because we are going to use these formulas and these machines doesn’t mean we have to use flawed inputs, however. Garbage in leads to garbage out, and the BCS is getting contaminated inputs almost from the get-go.

We’re talking about the built-in component of a poll average, where a team’s standing in both the Coaches’ Poll and the Harris Interactive College Poll comes into play. While the Harris Poll has been a step in the right direction for the BCS, the Coaches’ Poll has become so laughable that its credibility is overshadowed by its glaring errors with each season.

The Harris Poll came into play last season and is the only thing in the BSC not reeking of BS. This compilation is a weekly ranking of the top 25 teams in Division I-A, put together by a group of former players, coaches, administrators, and current and former media.

This poll, created in 2005 to supplant the AP poll, gains its credibility by not coming out with preseason rankings, as it doesn’t peg the teams until a few weeks of the season have already gone by.

Wait, this is seeing what you’re evaluating before actually doing it? Quick, somebody send a memo to the lost soul who gave Duke a vote in the preseason Coaches’ Poll.

Yes, in football.

Yes, the same program that has won nine games since 2002 and has already been shutout three times is stumbling to a very Duke-like 0-4 start. Division I-AA Richmond came into Durham, N.C., and kept the Blue Devils off the scoreboard with a 13-0 win.

I’m not sure what bothers me more — seeing that score, or knowing that, somewhere, somehow, there’s a mind capable of finding this vote acceptable. It might be the same person responsible for those awful Coors Light fake press conference commercials. I’d like to think so, at least; the thought of multiple minds operating on this level does frighten me.

Surely we can do better than this, can’t we?

This is just a subset of the larger problem — having input on something before you see it when your two cents is actually going to matter. How else could you explain a No. 2 preseason ranking for Notre Dame, a team that simply kids itself with too brutal of a schedule to remain that high in the rankings?

Ranking a team before it even straps on the pads only creates lofty expectations that are sometimes not met, or it gives false hope to the team’s opposition when they beat them only to find out three weeks later how grossly overrated they were to begin with?

If our rankings are so accurate, why do we have to drop Notre Dame 10 spots a week after losing to Michigan, a team that moved up eight spots in the same week, because it took us three weeks to realize that the Wolverines are a better team this season?

The danger of these dramatic swings isn’t just a matter of national attention, though. They are going to come into play in a few months when it is time to decide who is going to play for all the marbles.

Ohio State has been the consensus No. 1 with every possible bit of validation there could be for a college football team. USC and Auburn are vying for No. 2 with not as much validation. The Trojans have had a few unimpressive games already, which is fine when you are replacing Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush, and the Tigers followed up an impressive win over LSU with a not-so-impressive win over South Carolina on national television.

Michigan, which started the season No. 14 in the AP and No. 15 in the Coaches’ Poll, may have already risen to No. 6, but who is to say that the Wolverines stand a chance of leapfrogging USC or Auburn? Should the Trojans and or Tigers win out, you will be hard pressed to find any sportswriter or coach who will drop an unbeaten in the rankings to make sure Michigan moves up.

The Wolverines would have to get through Ohio State to stay unbeaten, but there’s no guarantee that any amount of wins will even give them a fighting chance to move into the top two BCS spots, and it would be partially because of where they were unfairly placed in the rankings before any pair of media eyes saw them take a snap.

This won’t be the first time we see a team fail to rise adequately in the rankings despite beating every team in front of it. In 2004, USC and Oklahoma were ranked No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, to start the season. Those rankings held for the entire season, as both went unbeaten and earned the right to face each other in the national championship game.

Auburn started 17th in the AP poll and 18th in the Coaches’ Poll. All the Tigers did was finish unbeaten in the SEC, the best conference in the nation, mind you, and rise all the way to No. 3 in the final rankings, garnering three first-place votes.

Sure, Oklahoma and USC had to be in the title game. You can’t drop unbeaten teams that late in the season. Did Auburn deserve a chance, too? Of course. Did they get it? Well how could they, with so much ground to make up when all the Sooners and Trojans had to do was win to stay put. Keep in mind that Utah also went unbeaten that year and, while the Utes couldn’t have come within two touchdowns of the top two teams, the fact is that the team (preseason ranked No. 21) didn’t ever have a chance to even play for a title.

Unless preseason rankings in the Coaches’ Poll go, or the rankings themselves are abolished, I think we are now always going to remember who No. 3 is: the non-winner that people do remember.

Geoff Dutelle is a senior staff writer for The Pitt News.