USC, Georgia, Florida -- Even Ohio State -- Got It Right

So, a big weekend of college football saw lots of top teams get knocked off their perches.

Big deal.

If history is any indicator, they'll all hover around the top and, more than likely, one of them will be right back there by season's end. I'd guess it will be USC, but time will tell.

It all comes down to polls, which, in all honesty, are a silly way to determine any type of champion. For years, that's all there was. Now, the BCS tries to even the score -- mostly to no avail.

Who said that any team should be ranked where they are? Writers. Coaches. It's all based on opinion, not fact. Not performance. Opinion. Where in sports does that count for anything, except in college?

Before a college team plays a down -- or in basketball, scores a basket, or in baseball, scores a run -- opinions determine where they rank.

And so, when they lose, opinions determine how far they should fall in the polls -- if at all. Ohio State loses big to USC? They drop about 10 spots, to push them, for all practical purposes, out of national title contention for good. That's probably as it should be, considering their lackluster performances against YSU, Ohio and even Troy.

Now it will be interesting to see where USC lands, after losing to Oregon State, a team that previously lost to -- wait for it -- Stanford.

Fact is, it always comes down to how you perform on the field. Teams lose. Sometimes, they lose games they're not supposed to, like when the New England Patriots lost the Super Bowl to the New York Giants. After the USC debacle on Thursday night, favored teams like Georgia and Florida were upended on Saturday.

So we end up waiting breathlessly for the polls to come out, so we can determine who, for now, is the #1 team in the land.

Why? Why do we need to know that now?

We don't know who the best team in Major League Baseball is, and won't until after the World Series is played. What a novel concept. Play the season, play the playoffs, and let performance on the field be the only arbiter.

Same goes for the NFL, where we won't have a clue until the Super Bowl is played. Oh, sure, last year everybody thought the Patriots were tops -- perhaps the best ever. Performance said otherwise. And they were beaten by a Giants team that, had polls been relied upon, might have been excluded from the playoffs altogether.

Granted, there's never been an equitable method determined to have a college football playoff, and chances are there never will be.

And so we have the odd system of determining rankings by opinion. And that takes us back to the headline on this post. The teams that have already lost are in a better position to be higher ranked than any team that loses down the road.

Oklahoma and Alabama are sitting pretty right now. But, should they lose a game later on, look out! They'll tumble several spots, and one or more of the teams that have already lost will move ahead of them. We see it every year. A loss late in the season is far more costly than a loss early in the season.

It's silly, but that's the way it is. Don't be surprised if one of the early losers -- USC, Florida or Georgia -- finds its way back up the rankings and into the BCS title game. Not because somebody else just as deserving lost more games, but because they lost one at the wrong time -- late in the season.