Preseason AP Poll Should Rank Every SEC West Team

Few will argue there is a better division in all of college football than the SEC West. The lone chink in the armor of the SEC West is the division’s disastrous bowl season in 2014 when all of the top 5 teams lost. There are many reasons why bowl games aren’t the best tool for measuring the strength or weakness of conference, but that’s a topic for another time.

A lot has been made of the fact Mississippi State is being picked to finish last in the SEC West in the upcoming season. Many Bulldog fans are claiming disrespect. But David Wunderlich over at TeamSpeedKills.com is doing an interesting series on what he believes is the most intriguing storyline of the SEC West.

Who will finish last?

He started the series with a look at one of the teams most people believe will finish close to the bottom with Texas A&M. If you read the post, he says something I have felt all along. There isn’t a bad team in the SEC West. Chances are high every team in the division will finish bowl eligible for the second straight season. Despite many predictions Mississippi State will finish 7th in the SEC West, there have been some who still have the Bulldogs ranked in the Top 25. The belief Mississippi State will finish last may not be as much about disrespecting the Bulldogs as it is about simply someone has to finish there. And State lost the most experience, so that is where the Bulldogs are getting picked to finish.

I firmly believe every team in the SEC West is worthy of being ranked in the Top 25. But because the division will cannibalize itself, this won’t happen in 2015. It won’t happen unless the pollsters take advantage of the one time they can do it.

The Preseason AP Poll should rank every single team in the SEC West in the Top 25.

This won’t happen, but it should. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the SEC East lose all 14 games against the West. I don’t think this will happen, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it did. The SEC West doesn’t have the top 7 teams in the country, but if you placed any of the seven in another conference, whichever team you moved would compete for a conference crown.

Because pollsters have their own criteria for how they rank teams, the AP Poll won’t take the one chance they have to rank every team in the top 25 but they should. The SEC West has become even more of a gauntlet with Mississippi State and Ole Miss proving in 2014 they can hang with the big boys of the division.

The AP Preseason Poll will release in the next few weeks. It would be nice to see the AP voters take a chance to make a statement about the strength of the division. They won’t, but it would be cool if they did.

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