Every fall, before the first snap, before the first tailgate, before the first Saturday spent soaking up sun and watching football for 12 hours a day, the Associated Press and the fine folks at USA Today treat us to preseason rankings.

Upon closer examination, however, preseason rankings are provided to tell us something we already know. Nine times out of 10, the defending national champion is ranked number one (huge shocker there) and the perennial powers like USC, Texas, Ohio State, Oklahoma, and Florida usually find themselves in the top 10, with a couple dark horses from smaller conferences (Boise State and TCU) thrown in for good measure.

But do we really need anyone to tell us who’s going to contend for a title each year? Returning a Heisman trophy winner, a starting quarterback and perhaps the sharpest football mind we’ve seen in quite sometime in head coach Nick Saban, did we really need anyone to tell us that Alabama is the team to beat this year?

Imagine if your professors looked at you on the first day of class and doled out “pre-semester” rankings. “A, D, another D, dropping out in a week and a half, working at a hookah bar in a month, might make a B,” and so on and so forth, and you had to work especially hard to overcome that initial impression.

Some might argue that preseason rankings make for a more entertaining fall from grace or a more inspirational rise to power, but in my opinion, they’re unnecessary.

What distinguishes college football from professional football is the emotion and passion the players exhibit. They’re not playing for a paycheck and their third Lamborghini; they’re playing for a program, for pride and for an adoring fanbase that is familiar and dear to them. The exciting aspect of the college game is that any given Saturday there can be that one game that shocks the world.

Fans of the game will recall Appalachian State upsetting Michigan in the Big House three years ago, or Texas Tech upsetting Texas two years ago in Lubbock.

This is not to say that rankings are altogether useless. They’re quite helpful when aligning the major bowl matchups, but perhaps we could delay their debut until early October, when everyone has a few games under their belts.

They are, however, part of a broken system that remains only because it is the status quo. If preseason rankings are the peeling paint on the rusted, old car that is the current college football system, the postseason setup is the brake lines that were severed by that crazy girl you dated in high school that still stalks you on Facebook.

A playoff system is necessary and has been pleaded for on numerous occasions over the past decade—the university presidents and the NCAA are just too stubborn to do it. Their claims vary between the following: 1) we’d lose too much money 2) we don’t want to risk injury to our star players and 3) logistically speaking, a playoff system is not feasible.

Let’s go ahead and throw No. 1 out the window. You’re telling me the NCAA wouldn’t benefit from an Alabama or a USC playing three games in December instead of just one in January? The argument could be made that perhaps certain universities would benefit too much from playing additional games, but would it be all that difficult to work out a money-sharing system within conferences?

No. 2 is slightly trickier and would essentially come down to the brand of player on the field. Some players do have an NFL future to be worrying about, and that’s understandable, making this the most difficult of the handful of objections to overcome.

This brings us to door No. 3, the most ludicrous and laziest of the three excuses. If my brother and I can think of three conceivable, working playoff scenarios on a Saturday over the summer, I feel like a roomful of administrators could do the same over some flavored water.

Here’s the one I like the best: Take the six BCS conference champions and the champions of the Mountain West and the WAC and give them a first round bye, then take the remaining top-eight teams and seed them based on regular-season performance and pit them against the conference champs. You now have a 16-team, postseason playoff that only extends the season by four weeks and would give you multiple David vs. Goliath, “Boise State toppling Oklahoma” scenarios.

If you start after the conference championships, you could be finished by the second week of January. You could even assign the final four matchups to existing traditional January bowls such as the Rose and Orange Bowls. That wasn’t so difficult, was it?

Instead, we’re made to suffer through irrelevant preseason polls and an ultimately uninspired college postseason.

At the end of every BCS season there are two or three teams that have a legitimate claim to the effect of, “that could’ve/should’ve been us.”

Here’s to upsetting the apple cart just enough to change the status quo this year.