In all sincerity, that’s no less useful or ridiculous than anything else we are seeing regarding this year‘s bowl season. If you are projecting teams before they’ve even gone to camp, those are not predictions, those are guesses. There’s no expertise whatsoever involved in any of that. It’s literally guessing how many jellybeans are in a jar. That’s not a prediction, it is a straight up guess.
Projecting teams on such a small sample size as a "camp" is dumb. The numbers show it actually makes more sense to take into account the last 4 to 5 seasons when projecting a team to get a proper sample size. A camp really shouldn't do anything except for injuries. But that would be tweaking projections more than making them based on the camp.
Well, I’m certainly not going to defend the Preseason Top 25. I think the
postseason Top 25 is stupid and outdated. I won’t begin to defend the
preseason version of it as I don’t own a crystal ball.
However, the reason why I think a camp is valuable is it allows you to account for the emergence of new starters and freshmen. More importantly, it allows you to account for injuries.
For example, if god forbid Kenny Pickett tears his ACL during our camp, that would have a dramatic impact on our season, right? I trust that most people understand that if our talented young quarterback gets hurt our season is very likely over at that point.
Well, there’s going to be injuries just like that hypothetical injury all over the country in camps all across the country. We know that because we see it every single year. There’s also going to be guys who emerge that no one is counting on right now and other guys who falter that no one is imagining is going to falter. That’s the fun of all of this.
None of that is accounted for in any of these “predictions.” It’s just typical college athletics shyster-ism.
When Dion Lewis came in, the stud running back coming in to replace Shady McCoy was supposed to be Ray Graham. That’s all anyone talked about was Ray Graham. Nobody said two words about Dion Lewis until camp started.
Then, once they actually started to practice in pads, people started noticing how good Lewis was and frankly, how much better he was than Graham. I can still remember people on this board who were at practices consistently telling anyone who would listen that Lewis was the stud prospect of the two. Those people were proven right.
I just don’t like anything that is such obvious guess work. There’s no skill in that and there’s certainly no expertise in that. That’s just people throwing shit at the wall and hoping it sticks. I don’t respect that at all.
