From the right perspective, the predictable outrage from jilted SEC fan bases is hilarious.

As soon as the SEC media’s predicted order of finish gets released Thursday — likely tabbing Alabama or Georgia as the preseason favorite, and if not, Auburn — a handful of fan bases will take to social media and the comments section of articles and lose it.

(Did you catch Peter Burns’ appearance as a guest host on The Paul Finebaum Show this week? When he predicted Alabama to lose five games this season, one caller suggested he was “high off fart bubbles.”)

That’s part of the humor of it. But the real unintentional comedy comes from understanding how little the collective opinion of the media matters.

It used to be that a strong preseason ranking was imperative for a team trying to finish the season in the BCS National Championship. Get undervalued before the season, and due to the logistics of rankings, a team could go unbeaten or be one of several one-loss programs and never get a chance at a title.

But now? Mississippi State was unranked in the Associated Press poll last year just weeks before they ascended to No. 1 in the inaugural College Football Playoff committee rankings.

Even more hilarious is reacting to the collective media’s predictions as if they a) have any bearing on the outcome of games, which are decided on the field, last time I checked, or b) have any strong correlation with the actual results of the season.

Let’s be honest: the SEC media is awful at predicting the conference. In 2013, the media poll predicted Missouri to finish sixth in the SEC East. The Tigers won the division. In 2014, the media poll predicted South Carolina to win the SEC East. The Gamecocks finished fifth in the division, losing to sixth-place Kentucky and scrapping into a bowl at 6-6.

The media experienced some early success, as its predicted champion at least played in the title game all four years from 1992-95. Since then, the media’s predicted SEC champion has won its division and played in the title game just four times in 19 years.

I could splice and parse the numbers in a dozen different ways. The bottom line is that the media is really, really bad at predicting the SEC standings before the season. There are sure to be at least one or two preseason guesses that turn out to be embarrassingly bad.

So take heart, Mississippi State fans. When we predict you to finish last in the SEC West next week, which is likely to happen, rather than blowing a gasket, you should smile. It’s almost sure to be wrong.

And Georgia, you should be paying media members not to vote you as the SEC East favorite. (I plan to predict the Bulldogs to win the SEC, but I’m willing to negotiate a price if you’d rather me not. Just saying.)

The entire process gets taken way too seriously, by media members, fans, and sometimes coaches and players.

Then again, the reaction after the first week or two of the season can be pretty comical as well. Several of my colleagues were ready to crown Texas A&M as a sure-thing Top 10 team after the Aggies demolished South Carolina on the opening Thursday of last season. Some media members were ready to anoint Kenny Hill as a Heisman Trophy frontrunner as well.

If you were to import someone from a cave in a third-world country in the middle of an SEC stadium, or perhaps on set of the Finebaum show, and have them listen and watch people’s faces — unable to understand the language — and then ask what all the shouting was about, I’d imagine the guesses would be something like this:

Someone murdered someone else’s family member?
Did a village get raped and pillaged?
Is there a war going on?

Certainly to those not immersed in the SEC, the reactions, outrage and tone are more fit for some violent wrongdoing than silly predictions about a game played by college kids on a few Saturdays in the fall.

Then again, in that scenario, those people clearly don’t understand the SEC. It’s that sort of unbridled, nonsensical passion that makes the conference, all 14 programs, and every game so great.

The reactions are hilarious in their predictability, but impressive and sad on other levels, all at the same time. It’s a kaleidoscope of the human condition, in strong doses.

And there’s only one cure.

Who else is ready for football?