I’m obsessed with college sports polls. I’ll admit it.

My alarm clock rings a bit before noon on Sundays to make sure I don’t miss the early slate of NFL games. Then I quickly flip on my computer so I can make sure nobody in my fantasy football starting lineup had an overnight case of the gout. But then it’s over to get my weekly fix over at the college football rankings pages.

This week, after ascertaining that Philip Rivers had not, after all, come down with the whooping cough, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Northwestern had entered one of the two widely accepted polls for the first time since the Amado Villarreal era: the Wildcats were ranked No. 25 by the Coaches’ Poll by USA Today.

But my fascination with these polls comes not because I think these polls are accurate or even mean anything in terms of college football goodness: instead, much like my crippling addiction to Jersey Shore, my disturbing curiosity is because of the unique social insights that these polls provide.

Polls are fun, but they’re subject to the same issues that every debate on Around the Horn suffers from. Studies show that teams that lose early in the season are much less likely to return to prominence in a poll than teams that lose similar games late in the season. Studies also show that voters still think beating Notre Dame is difficult for no apparent reason.

The Coaches Poll – which has had NU ranked higher than the corresponding AP poll all season – is just silly. The premise is that 59 head coaches fill out a ballot Sunday morning of the best 25 teams in the country, but this is obviously crazy. Coaches have a busy week filled with practices, breaking down game tape, media availability, and, oh yeah, coaching a game from their own team. Note that nowhere in that list of responsibilities is the ability to meticulously pay attention to every other team in college football. So they likely hand off this, their least important responsibility, to some assistant’s assistant’s assistant and give them one simple directive: make us look good. And sure enough, when USA Today reveals the ballots at the end of the year, nearly every ballot ranks that coaches’ teams and regular-season opponents considerably higher than they should be. It’s sort of like how I like to create myself as a seven-foot-tall shotblocker with maxed-out statistics in NBA Street Vol. 2.

The AP Poll has similar problem. The voters here are great reporters. Generally, they’re assigned to cover one or two specific teams by a local paper – not to categorically summarize all 120 teams. As such, they’ll become experts on their teams; somebody assigned to cover NU sports by a Chicago paper would learn all the ins-and-outs of Dan Persa’s passing game, tell you why Vince Browne got that sack and tell you that 80’s power ballad “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn” by Poison is the only thing that can make Pat Fitzgerald cry (It’s a trade secret). But that specialization comes at the cost of the fact that they know exactly as much as me and you about whether Nevada or Oklahoma State is more worthy of the No. 21 spot.

So is Northwestern the 25th best team in the country? Probably not. Have they really not been one of the best 25 teams in the country since 2008? Probably not, either. Don’t take the polls at face value, but for what they really are: an opportunity to let us all realize how silly it is that anybody could think that beating Notre Dame is difficult.

Deputy sports editor Rodger Sherman is a Medill junior. He can be reached at [email protected].