West Virginia football coach Rich Rodriguez and his Mountaineers sing “Country Roads following the 2025 Gold-Blue Spring Showcase. (Photo by Frank Salucci/BlueGoldNews.com)
MORGANTOWN — As the Big 12 gathers for its annual football Media Days at the Dallas Cowboys headquarters in Frisco, Texas, on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, they do so without any preseason favorite to take home the 2025 championship.
Why?
They have done away with the preseason media poll, an event that possibly meant even less than the Fourth of July Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating championship and sometimes made you equally as ill watching it take place.
It is a step toward sanity in an age filled with insanity in collegiate sports, if you have a cellular phone and an inflated sense of your own worth, you can put out a blog or podcast, say the most outrageous thing that comes to mind and have the public ingest it as if it were Joey Chestnut at the annual hot dog eating contest.
In other words, you, too, can be Stephen A. Smith, although for the life of me I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be.
Now, in the pecking order of college football, preseason polls held little to no official value short of possibly placing a two-ton weight on the back of the team selected to win the league while giving a team far better than its preseason evaluation could use it for inspiration.
That, in fact, seemed to be the sole reason for its existence, at least at West Virginia, where no matter what the sport the athletic teams seem to be undervalued in all preseason — and most postseason — rankings.
One need look no further than the Mountaineers of 2023, who were ranked 14th and last in the preseason selection, a fact that was jumped upon by coach Neal Brown as an insult to his team. See, Brown understood that his team was far better than last in the conference and used it.
Around every corner in the Puskar Center there was a sign posted that said little more than “14” as a reminder of the disrespect that had been hurled at his team.
Brown never tried to hide the emotions he was feeling
“Upset about the media poll?” he asked at the time “Definitely do not agree with that. The good thing, the positive, is that the media has not been successful in recent years, so I think that bodes well for us.”
WVU finished with nine wins, including a bowl victory, and with a little luck could have stretched it into a 10 or 11-win season.
That miscarriage of justice wasn’t enough to get the league to act.
Last year did as Arizona State, the expansion team which was selected to finish 16th and last in the conference, won the league, beating Iowa State by 26 points in the championship game, received a bye into the College Football Playoff, then pushed eventual champion Texas through two overtimes before being eliminated when a couple of key calls went against them.
The calls were probably made by a couple of officials selected as the nation’s best in some preseason poll.
Anyway, the media performance in its Big 12 preseason poll showed that the team it picked last won the league and Utah, the team it picked first, went 5-7 and finished 13th in the conference with a 2-7 Big 12 record.
In fact, the five teams picked to finish atop the Big 12 ended up finishing 13-32 with Oklahoma State, picked third in the preseason, going 0-9 in conference play.
In other words, the media did not know what it was talking about.
Yes, I am a member of the media myself but I have not participated in the poll because I have learned through years of picking horses that I am not exactly Nostradamus when it comes to picking the future.
Truth is, not having a preseason poll is hardly worthy of any news short of being a sign of surrender to the changing times, one that was joined into this season also by the Big Ten.
Considering that the transfer portal has made it difficult to know who is playing on any given team and memorizing the uniform numbers of each, it’s a wonder the coaches can get any kind of grasp upon what their team is like.
West Virginia’s new coach Rich Rodriguez has brought in 80 or so new faces on what will wind up being a 105-player roster. The Mountaineers go to camp with new players, new coaches, a battle at the quarterback position.
If you believe you have any idea how they will do this season, I think you might be welcome to take a seat at next week’s poker game. Bright money. Lots of it. You will need it.
Multiply by 16 what you don’t know about WVU and you can get a grasp upon how difficult it is to figure out a projected order of finish.
The question remains if this is a good thing or a bad thing for the conference.
Was it better back in the New York Yankees glory days that everyone started the season conceding the title to them, just as they did in college football in the Oklahoma dynasty days or the Alabama days?
Did that build interest or take away from it, and will this yearly rebuild nationally where no one knows what their favorite teams will field more intriguing and build interest.
That, as they say, is why they play the games, so let’s get to it this week and try to figure out what the new year will be like in the Big 12.