Most all of the pundits and major media outlets have weighed in with their preseason rankings, so I thought I'd put them together here in one place and skip to the chase. The chart below shows the #1 team in each poll, as well as Stanford's ranking.
|
Poll |
Stanford Ranking |
Top Team |
|
AP |
21 |
USC |
|
USA Today |
18 |
LSU |
|
Sports Illustrated |
17 |
Alabama |
|
FOX Sports Power Rankings |
10 |
USC |
|
ESPN Power Rankings |
13 |
USC |
|
Ted Miller (ESPN) |
16 |
LSU |
|
Kevin Gimmell (ESPN) |
10 |
USC |
|
Ivan Maisel (ESPN) |
13 |
LSU |
|
Gene Wojciechowski (ESPN) |
14 |
USC |
Do these preseason polls really matter? That's a complicated question with a complicated answer. For schools like Alabama and USC and LSU, these preseason rankings don't mean a thing. Since they have the shared goal of winning a national championship, Nick Saban, Les Miles, and Lane Kiffin can completely ignore what all those folks have to say. Each coach knows that if his team takes care of business over the next three months, the BCS Championship Game will come to him.
For Stanford, it's a bit different.
Think back to 2009 when Toby Gerhart was running roughshod through the Pac-10 and finishing as the runner-up in a Heisman vote he should've won. The conventional wisdom held that Stanford had caught lightning in a bottle with Gerhart, and almost everyone believed that the Cardinal would fade back into irrelevance with his departure to the NFL. Even though observers close to the program realized that the offense would be even better in 2010 without Gerhart than it had been in '09 with him, Stanford was nowhere to be seen in any of the 2010 preseason polls. No one believed.
So this is the significance of these rankings. Following the loss of Andrew Luck, arguably the greatest football player of this generation and certainly the best Stanford player in at least thirty years, the expectations for Stanford Football remain high.
While David Shaw is fond of saying that preseason rankings should be printed on toilet paper because at least then you could use them for something, I'm sure he knows in his heart of hearts that these 2012 polls mean something. Whether it's the FOX Sports ranking of #10 or the AP's more pessimistic slot of #21, these numbers reflect a national belief in the program, not just the players. These prognosticators don't even know who will be replacing Luck at quarterback, but their respect for the brand of football Stanford has put on the field for the past three years is strong enough that it doesn't matter.
Because Stanford is still ranked in these preseason polls, a streak continues. Dating back to the second poll of 2010, the Cardinal has appeared in thirty-two consecutive AP polls, an accomplishment only ten other schools can claim: Alabama, Arkansas, Boise State, LSU, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, TCU, and Wisconsin. Stanford's inclusion on that list speaks to the consistency of the program and sends a message to potential recruits that Jim Harbaugh was right.
"We bow to no program here at Stanford University."
