Fourteen Coaches Picked Indiana First. They Also Ranked It Sixth.

Fourteen coaches picked Indiana to win the national championship. Those same coaches, on the same ballot, ranked Indiana sixth.

That is not a typo, and it is the strangest number in either preseason poll. The AFCA Coaches Poll we pulled Saturday morning carries seventy-two first-place votes. Ohio State took thirty-eight of them. Indiana took fourteen. Nobody else in the country took more than seven. Georgia, ranked third, drew seven. Oregon, ranked second, drew six. Notre Dame, ranked fifth, drew five. Texas, ranked fourth, drew two. The coaches produced a ballot in which the second-most-popular champion pick sits behind four teams that fewer of them believe in.

The point totals explain how that happens without explaining why it should. Notre Dame finished fifth with 1,524 points. Indiana finished sixth with 1,522. Two points, out of a possible 1,800, separate them, and Indiana holds nine more first-place votes. Pull out the fourteen ballots that had the Hoosiers first and the rest of the room lands them around sixth or seventh. That is a team with a passionate minority and a polite majority, which in August is a far more interesting profile than broad agreement.

Broad agreement is what Georgia has, and it is worth asking whether that is a compliment. In the Associated Press preseason poll, dated August 17 and carrying sixty-nine first-place votes, Georgia is third with none of them. Texas is fifth with none. Ohio State took forty, Oregon fourteen, Indiana eight, Notre Dame six, Miami one. Two of the AP's top five have nobody at all willing to say they win it. Consensus is not the same thing as conviction, and a poll that ranks a team third while no voter picks it first is telling you something the number itself hides.

The two polls were not even taken in the same month. The coaches ballot is dated August 4. The AP ballot is dated August 17. Thirteen days, which in a preseason is the difference between projecting a roster and watching one work. Some of what looks like writers disagreeing with coaches is really early August disagreeing with late August, and it shows up hardest at the edges of both lists.

Two teams sit on opposite sides of the same line. Clemson is twenty-third in the coaches poll and unranked by the AP, where it is the first name on the others-receiving-votes list. Louisville is twenty-fourth in the AP and unranked by the coaches, where it is the first name on theirs. Same evidence, two rooms, opposite verdicts, and each team is the first man off the bench in the poll that cut it.

The schedule audits that argument almost immediately. Louisville plays Ole Miss, ninth in the AP and tenth in the coaches poll, at Nissan Stadium in Nashville next Sunday night on ABC. It is the only game in the entire opening window that puts two AP-ranked teams on the same field. Clemson goes to Tiger Stadium to play LSU next Saturday night, also on ABC. One poll thinks each of those visitors belongs in the top 25. The other does not. By next Monday, the argument will have evidence attached to it.

The middle of both lists is a swap meet. Alabama is thirteenth to the writers and eleventh to the coaches. LSU is eleventh to the writers and thirteenth to the coaches. Those two simply traded chairs. Tennessee is twentieth and eighteenth. Washington is seventeenth and nineteenth. Penn State is eighteenth and seventeenth. The AP could not even separate USC and BYU, which finished in a dead heat at fourteenth with 839 points apiece. The coaches split the same two teams by fifty-seven points and a full slot.

Where the two electorates do agree is on the group they both declined to rank, and that agreement is its own kind of information. Fourteen programs appear on both others-receiving-votes lists: Florida, Boise State, Arizona, TCU, South Carolina, Illinois, Vanderbilt, Oklahoma State, Virginia Tech, UNLV, Georgia Tech, James Madison, Auburn and Memphis. That is a fourteen-team bubble the sport built and then refused to seat, roughly the size of a conference, and it is going to spend September mugging people. Boise State draws the hardest assignment of the bunch, at Autzen Stadium against Oregon next Saturday night on CBS.

Which makes today's eight-game slate a strange little audition. USC is the only ranked team on the board, hosting San Jose State at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum at 3 p.m. Eastern on NBC. A top-15 team playing this early has nothing to win and a poll line to lose, and the Trojans happen to be the exact team both electorates were least sure how to place.

The rest of the day belongs to programs the polls left just outside. TCU, which receives votes in both, opens against North Carolina at Aviva Stadium in Dublin at noon Eastern. Virginia and NC State meet at Scott Stadium in Charlottesville, and both drew coaches votes while neither drew a single AP vote. Florida State, another coaches-poll vote-getter the writers ignored, hosts New Mexico State at Doak Campbell Stadium. UNLV and Memphis, who receive votes in both polls and are ranked by neither, close the night at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas.

Everything else today has nothing to do with rankings and is better for it. Jacksonville State visits North Dakota State in the Fargodome at 5:30 Eastern. Sacramento State goes to Eastern Michigan at Rynearson Stadium an hour later. Hawaii lands at Stanford Stadium at seven. And Montana State, which took twenty-five of twenty-six first-place votes in the FCS coaches poll and is the most lopsided favorite anywhere in the sport, does not play at all.

One more number worth holding onto. Miami sits seventh in both polls and owns the only AP first-place vote cast outside the top six, and the Hurricanes are the single top-ten team in this entire opening window listed as the road team, at Stanford Stadium next Friday night on ESPN. Everybody else in the top ten is home or has been handed the home designation at a neutral site. If you want an early read on whether the writers or the coaches are closer to right, watch the one contender the schedule actually made travel.

Here is the position, stated plainly: the coaches are right about Indiana and the writers are hedging. A team does not collect fourteen first-place votes from the people who have to scheme against it by accident. The Hoosiers open next Saturday at noon Eastern against North Texas at Memorial Stadium in Bloomington on FOX, and that will settle nothing, because openers never do. This gets settled in November, when somebody ranked has to go win a game in a building that hates them. Until then, the two polls keep disagreeing in public, and one of them is going to look very smart.