Your Way-Too-Early Top 25 Is Way Too Useless

The NCAA men’s basketball national championship game was Monday; if you missed it, you really didn’t miss much. UNC bested Gonzaga in a physical, sometimes ugly, run-of-the-mill college basketball game to secure the Tar Heels’ sixth title in program history. The refs weren’t great (neither were the players), but with the final buzzer and the supposed “redemption” it brought North Carolina, the college basketball season was over.

“Ahh,” I thought. “Another season in the books. Time to start maybe thinking about college football in a few weeks.” How naive.

The soil has barely settled on the 2017 season; so, I ask, just what in the damn hell is this? And this? And this? And this? And this? And this? And this?

This, of course, is not unique to college basketball—the same shit happened in January and February after the college football season ended. Thanks to the fact that every single sport and its accompanying field of beats and national writers seems to think “[INSERT YOUR SPORT] never sleeps!!!” readers are subjected to stupid shit like the above collections of way-too-early predictions and previews.

The practice has become a fixture among sportswriters, borne of the need for that sweet, sweet content, standing in direct violation of the bylaws of nature, which dictate that every sport hibernate for at least two months before troubling the masses yet again. Never mind the fact that these analyses are almost always shallow, proven wrong within three games of regular season play, and slanted toward big programs—half of this shit is just a reminder of the new top-50 recruit names we’ll have to learn next winter, not an educated look at how the said recruits will actually function together on a court. (The only preview series that actually manages to be worth a damn this far away from the actual season is Bill Connelly’s college football preview, and he’s just doing it now because he’s an insane man who thoroughly previews every single team in Division I football.)

College basketball: Please take a nap, and don’t wake up until October.