Are preseason rankings appropriate for a college football ranking system? If so, please explain how they are appropriate? If not, then please justify your position.
If the preseason rankings are just an expression of the ranking system’s opinion of how the teams will perform during the season, then there is no harm in publishing them. However, if they affect the rankings during the season instead of how the teams are actually performing, then the ranking system seems to have a bias built into it which should be avoided.
SPRS (Superior Performance Ranking System) does not publish a preseason ranking because there are no results before the season which the system can use to determine what the rankings should be. In fact SPRS does not publish rankings until after Week 4 of the season because the system needs sufficient performance data in order to provide a ranking that is considered accurate.
SPRS does not depend on past performance or current potential to determine what it considers an accurate ranking. The ranking system uses score margin and current opponent ranking as a measure of performance to determine what points a team earns each week.