Coaches are awful at preseason poll picks.
It isn’t that we don’t know what we’re doing – even though a good chunk of fans would probably say we don’t – it’s that we’re so busy with our own in-house priorities, and maybe the next opponent’s, that it’s impossible to have fingers in every other teams’ pies.
For 12 straight seasons, from Washington to Arkansas, an email would hit my inbox asking all head coaches in the conference to predict the outcome of our league from top to bottom. It usually popped up in early October. We didn’t even know who our starters would be on opening night, much less what the other coaches in our league were doing in their practices.