For those of you that are college basketball fans, you know that the preseason top 25 polls came out earlier this week.

North Carolina is No. 1 in both the coaches and Associated Press poll, and are a unanimous No. 1 in the AP poll. It is the first time in the AP poll’s history that a team is a unanimous No. 1 in the preseason poll.

But what does it really mean? Well, what it means is a big ole heap of nothing. Polls are nice to look at and make for some good bragging rights among fans of schools that are ranked, but really are worth about the paper this column is printed on. Well, that’s not true, with the rising cost of printing paper, the poll is worth much less than the paper this column is printed on. 
Polls – especially preseason ones – are about as accurate as those people that get pulled out of the stands at basketball games to shoot 3-pointers after spinning around in circles.

Pollsters usually look at two things when they are voting on teams in the preseason – last year’s record and the name on the front of the jersey.

A perfect example is the Duke Blue Devils, not that good of a team last year. The Dukies lacked an inside presence and relied on the 3-point shot way too much. But that didn’t stop voters from seeing Duke on the front of their jerseys and voting them into the top 10. Duke eventually lost in the second round of the NCAA Tournament to West Virginia, the second consecutive year the Devils have missed the Sweet 16. Yet they are in the preseason top 10 once again this year.

Then there’s Syracuse. The voters have great respect for Orange coach Jim Boeheim, with good reason. The coach has been a successful coach for a long time, and finally won a long-overdue national championship a few years ago.

However, the past few years, Syracuse has not been very good. They’ve missed the NCAA Tournament two years in a row. But every year they are all over the Top 25 poll

College basketball’s way to resolve the poll madness is the NCAA Tournament. It’s amazing how different the tournament selection committee seedings are from the Top 25 poll. Teams can decide who the best team is on the floor, playing against one another.

College football is another matter. With no playoff, the poll is all that matters, and it determines who plays for the national championship and who makes the BCS Championship Series games, which means millions of dollars for the competing schools and conferences.

It’s much too important to mess up with unnecessary preseason polls. The first poll should not come out until at least four or five weeks into the season. That way, pollsters have a chance to see how each team does this season, not how they performed last season or what the name of the school is.

A perfect example is Auburn in 2004. The Tigers began the season at No. 17, and despite their perfect record they never could make up the difference and were left out in the cold as Southern Cal and Oklahoma played for the national championship.

With so much money on the table for teams and conferences, moving the first poll of the season for football and basketball back several weeks seems to be an easy way to assure a more fair way of ranking the teams.

Jeff Edwards is the sports editor for The Natchez Democrat. He can be reached at 601-445-3632 or jeff.edwards@natchezdemocrat.com.