Yesterday, the new preseason Coaches’ Poll was released. In it, the Gators were nowhere to be found. You have to count all the way down to 12th in the list of also receiving votes to find UF.
My best advice in response to this: do not care one bit.
For starters, the Coaches’ Poll has long been the least useful of the major ranking systems. Back when I was a kid and just wasn’t that savvy about things, I thought it was the gold standard. But then after I got to college and really started paying close attention — around the time when I started blogging about college football, not coincidentally — it really became apparent how the Coaches’ Poll was inferior to the AP Poll.
I came to know the reason later on. One is obvious: coaches don’t spend time on anything other than their teams and their schedules for the year. That’s why it often seems like the Coaches’ Poll is the land where everyone is what they were 10-20 years ago, USC is about to break through, and Texas is always back. Despite being true experts on football, coaches are actually what the political world would refer to as low-information voters.
On top of that, the secret has gotten out that a lot of coaches don’t actually do the votes. They might do a first pass, but then it falls to the sports information director to do a once-over to make sure that a team that just lost to a bad team actually falls and stuff like that. Supposedly some SIDs do the entire thing, plus or minus the coach parachuting in a the last moment to strategically move some teams around.
In other words, the Coaches’ Poll is fairly useless.
I used to do an annual feature where I would order the teams in the top ten of the preseason Coaches’ Poll by who’s the most likely team to finish the season unranked. That’s because nearly every year someone actually does start that high and end that low. Last year, preseason No. 8 Iowa State and No. 9 North Carolina didn’t just finish unranked but didn’t receive a single vote in the final poll.
I might have to bring this feature back because the bottom half of this year’s top ten is so suspect. No. 6 Michigan lost its defensive difference makers. No. 7 Texas A&M is shaky because Jimbo can’t win big without a senior quarterback to run his needlessly complex system anymore. No. 8 Utah will be tough but doesn’t have the high end talent to guarantee a second straight Pac-12 championship-type year. No 9 Oklahoma has a new staff and lost a lot to transfer, and No. 10 Baylor has to prove Dave Aranda’s 2021 adjustments are of lasting quality.
Of course by now, both of the traditional polls are not useful as anything other than conversation starters. They diverge in the preseason because the Coaches’ Poll drops first, but then the SIDs start cribbing off of the AP Poll. And then when the selection committee starts releasing the Playoff poll, both start copying off of that.
For those reasons alone, it’s not worth worrying about how low Florida is in the preseason poll. Here are some more reasons.
UF is not terribly proven in a lot of places. Anthony Richardson has the potential to be one of the top quarterbacks, but he hasn’t proven he will be. The DTs aside from Gervon Dexter have the potential to be good enough to fix the run defense, but they haven’t proven they will. Ditto the inside linebackers aside from Ventrell Miller. The receivers have the potential to be a complete unit, but they haven’t proven it. And so on. People tend to vote more on what is proven than on potential.
Florida also has a tougher schedule than normal. They get those preseason top ten Utes in Week 1, and the West rotation brought preseason top ten A&M to the slate. Toss in Georgia and that’s three preseason top ten opponents right there. Kentucky made the top 25, and both Tennessee and LSU received more votes than the Gators did.
The perception outside Gainesville, in other words, is that even an improved team may have trouble improving its record because of how hard the schedule is. A lot of people will do preseason rankings based not on how good they think the teams are but where they think they’ll end up. Florida’s win total over/unders have been around 6.5 when I’ve looked, and 7-win teams don’t generally make the final poll.
But again, to use a term the kids like these days, the Coaches’ Poll is the Vibes Poll. It’s more about how people feel about the teams than any hard analysis. Whatever the conventional wisdom you’ll find from the old guard of the sport — think Tony Barnhart and similar types — that’s what you’ll get from the Coaches’ Poll.
Florida is not a top 25 team in terms of vibes. Things got bad in the waning days of the last staff. If people know one thing about why Mullen was fired, it’s because he didn’t recruit well enough. Therefore, people see UF as a team that struggled down the stretch and who is lacking in the talent department.
There’s a lot more to the story than that, but we’re talking vibes here, man. If the Gators outperform their expectations, they’ll get ranked soon enough. Perhaps as soon as Week 2 after beating Utah. It’s just not worth worrying about at all.