I responded to one of the comments from earlier about the timing of the Mumme Poll. As Dawg in Austin pointed out, it used to come out later in the season and EE mentioned it didn’t come out until the CFP Committee released them. True, and in the spirit of it I could’ve kept it that way, but let’s not forget that the offseason is for pundits and “professionals” to make their expert prognostications, so why the hell not us?
Case in point, let’s reflect on Josh Pate’s 2025 Preseason SEC QB rankings:
Expert. Chef’s Kiss. I mean, on paper, DJ Lagway was the man. Sellers had incredible upside. Austin Simmons looked like he was the second coming of Bryce Young when he stepped in and shredded the Georgia defense in Oxford when Jaxson Dart left early in the game.
Half of the list now has a new head coach. Four of the QBs have left and moved on to other programs.
Now, one could say “that’s parity”. College football is delightfully unpredictable now, no? That’s how NIL and the Transfer Portal have “leveled the playing field”. Let’s think back to how much has changed in just the short life cycle of this sister companion blog since the Senator’s passing:
- Jim Harbaugh won a national championship. He’s now an NFL coach, and the rest of the staff are serving probation. The AD that oversaw this mess was the chairman of the new CFP.
- Indiana won a national championship. In football. They won it with a transfer quarterback and a team of guys old enough to be veterans on NFL football teams, and they did it by beating Miami with Carson Beck as their quarterback, after Carson started two seasons with Georgia and was enrolled in Athens since COVID.
- Pat McAfee has become the face of ESPN’s Gameday, and he sits next to Nick Saban while doing it. This is a real thing in 2026.
- Kirby Smart is the senior football coach in the SEC. The next closest in seniority is coaching at Missouri. The head coach at Vanderbilt currently has a longer tenure than the head coaches at 10 SEC schools.
- The B1G has won three of the last national championships, and two of them by teams no one really thought could do it.
- Alabama is entering the season predicted to finish 6th, behind Ole Miss, Texas A&M, and LSU.
- Notre Dame has a clause in the CFP that gets them automatically in the CFP if they finish high enough, regardless of who they beat or lost to. And they still are Independent, and the richest football program in the country. Some things never change, I guess.
Who knew? More importantly…who the hell knows?
I say all this to say that we might as well rank the teams as we see fit and maybe we have the insight that everyone is missing. Can you crystal ball it? Heck no…the only thing that is guaranteed is that someone or something will screw the whole thing up and give us something that no one saw coming, and the CFP Committee will piss off everyone outside of the B1G.
Who knows, by November, we might be realizing that we all slept on and overlooked the new power coach in college football, revitalizing a program and turning it into a new CFP powerhouse.
It’s 2026. Anything can happen…so please, vote away in the Mumme Poll!
I already voted! đ
I just did a top 25 instead of the usual, âwho can win the national championshipâ method.
By the way, I do like the concept of doing it now because it is a good barometer through the use of preferential balloting (I can vote for one team or 130 teams as opposed to 1-25 mandatory). The issue was the preseason (and early season) traditional polls with forced ranking is that a voter tends to keep the ballot the same as long as someone doesnât lose.
The percentage of appearances on a ballot are a pretty good measure of what the overall population thinks of a particular team.
Peyton and the Senator did it their way to show that a bunch of interested college football fans can do as good (or better) job as the Grapevine asshats, the coaches or the self-appointed media experts.
When the poll was started the timing was good then. The sport and coverage of it has greatly changed since then. I like the idea of doing it now. My guess is the readers here are more accurate then most experts.
I was enjoying this column until I scrolled down far enough to the the top of that head and knew who it was.
How the fuck does pate have a job with such stupid shit as that?
Excellent piece. Indeed anything can happen–you mentioned two of my less favorite CFB “pundits”–a hot take specialist in a white t-shirt and a carnival barker that hijacked what used to be my go-to Saturday pre-game show! There’s a few a guys out there that seem to do the work and actually study before publishing (The Film Guy) but in general the so-called pundit group seem like a lazy bunch to me—more or less reading and rehashing what the other guy said. Nice work if you can get it.