I’ve never understood the hype behind pre-season polls.

Last week, the AP Top 25 was released, numbering off the best college football teams in the country. I have many friends that jump on the bandwagon and let themselves get carried away with what their team is ranked.

My best friend is a gamecock and loves the fact that South Carolina is ranked above the Georgia Bulldogs.

But the truth is… a single ball hasn’t even been snapped yet. Not a single play has been run. We are still a just over a week out from any game being played.

Regardless of what the polls say, the preseason is the preseason. The numbers are a projection of what the teams currently look like, and how they might perform going into their first games. The first few weeks of the season are when those rankings can most easily change. So if a team really is over ranked (I’m looking at you Oregon, with all your new-school swag), then they’ll get what’s coming to them, and relatively quickly.

And I fully expect there to be a lot of shifting happening on the road to the College Football Selection Committee releasing their first rankings after week four. Unranked Texas is the big school I have in mind. With their new head coach, former Louisville coach Charlie Strong, and a new mentality, those boys are surely starving to prove the naysayers wrong and climb back up to the top.

We shouldn’t be too quick to turn our backs on Florida either. Their train wreck of a 2013 season was due to 18 starters sitting on the bench with injuries by November. But a healthy team this year should be strong and capable of making a run for an SEC Championship.

By week four, I think the top 10 will be a completely different landscape. Until then, though, I’d like to see people lay off the gas and understand anything can happen.