Hey, you. You know who you are. You’re the person who wants a break of talk of COVID-19. It’s not selfish to crave actual football content. Football always has been and always will be an escape.

So that’s the plan for this coming week at SDS. Consider this your means of escaping talk about a pandemic that’s become annoyingly politicized (our news team will still keep you up to date on all the latest developments in this fluid season).

Top 25 Week will address the elephant in the room, of course. We’re not going to talk about this like it’s a totally normal season. It’s not. Rosters and schedules appear more fluid than ever. LSU star Ja’Marr Chase reportedly opted out Sunday to begin training for the NFL Draft.

Shoot, only 6 of the 10 FBS conferences have football as of this writing, including 3 Power 5 conferences (sorry Big Ten and Pac-12 fans). What we will do is talk about the on-field elements based on all of the scheduling/COVID-19 related issues in place.

Sound good? Good.

If you’re a fan of actual football content — especially SEC-heavy football content — you’ve come to the right place. We’ll rank quarterbacks, running backs, coaches, teams, games and probably a few other things that I’m forgetting about. I promise you won’t be able to predict how all of these rankings will look, but as for what we’ll be ranking, I don’t mind sharing that. From Monday-Saturday, we’ll have 9 stories related to Top 25 rankings.

  • Monday
    • Top 25 teams for 2020
    • Top 25 coaches for 2020
  • Tuesday
    • Top 25 SEC offensive players for 2020
  • Wednesday
    • Top 25 QBs for 2020
    • Top 25 RBs for 2020
  • Thursday
    • Top 25 SEC defensive players for 2020
    • Top 25 defensive play-callers in college football
  • Friday
    • Top 25 SEC freshmen for 2020
  • Saturday
    • Top 25 games for 2020

After all, it’s fall camp time. Now is the time when we’re supposed to be getting mad about rankings.

Consider that my way of saying, yes, we obviously hate your favorite team and that’s why we didn’t give your favorite player enough love. That bias is clearly at the root of every decision we make. Duh.

Jokes aside, it feels good to get back to some this stuff. We got into this business because we liked breaking down things like why Kyle Trask is better than Bo Nix, or why Mark Stoops is a better coach than people realize.

That’s one thing that I promise you’ll see this year. You’ll learn things that will make you a smarter college football fan. I know that because I’ll learn things just by writing many of these rankings stories.

We rank things because in college football, rankings are important. They shape perception. They set the stage for a season. They sell tickets (in non-pandemic years). Shoot, rankings decide who gets to play for a championship. Granted, the Playoff selection committee might or might not have more of an impact on actual college football things than my ranking of the country’s Top 25 teams.

But you know what? We’re not going to hear from them for several months. Instead, you’ll get to hear from us at SDS.

In a time like now, there’s something cleansing about Florida and Georgia fans bickering whenever a ranking comes out. I love getting overly worked up about why Texas A&M was ranked far too high by the masses to start the year. We love college football because of the discussion it produces.

That’s what we hope to provide 365 days a year, but it’s especially our goal during Top 25 week — discussion. Good, healthy football discussion (and that’s not to say we’re going to rank Vandy as the No. 3 team in college football just because it would get people talking). Actual football discussion has been somewhat on the back burner throughout this offseason, and understandably so. These past few months have been unlike anything during my lifetime, and unless you’re old enough to remember when World Wars impacted the college football season, chances are, this is foreign territory for you, too.

Join us for what figures to be a strange, unpredictable ride. We can acknowledge the impact of this unprecedented time in sports and American history while consuming actual college football content. If you made it this far, I’m gonna assume you’re OK with that.

Let’s rank, y’all.