By: JJ Lanier

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

As we approach the middle of the college football season and the Big 10 and PAC-12 look to start their schedules, I want to take a minute and look back at a few things that have stuck out up to this point.

To begin with, the Top 25 rankings have about as much relevancy as the Art Appreciation class you took second semester your Junior year. I get it’s only fair to rank the teams that have actually played, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a bit misleading.

Trying to do this without including teams from two of the major conferences is like listing the best Adam Sandler movies, but only including those that have gone straight to Netflix; North Carolina is a perfect example.

If this were any other year the Tarheels would be a fringe Top 20 team, but instead they were ranked 5th before losing to Florida State- they were basically Hubie Halloween.

Secondly, the SEC has dropped all pretense about trying to give off the perception they are a defense first league.

The conference has been trending this way for a few years now, but even those stalwarts who hung their arguments about the defense on the lone 12-9 game every year can’t really argue at this point.

That’s not to say the SEC is the Big 12 where recruiting a defensive player is akin to begrudgingly drafting a player in the youth league because their dad volunteered to coach.

The SEC still has a plethora of talent on that side of the ball, it’s just the level of talent they’re seeing on the offensive side of the ball has grown exponentially.

It’s no surprise though, when you look at some of the coaches the conference has brought in recently; many of whom are offensive-minded.

I give the coaches and athletic directors a lot of credit for changing with the times; it’s one of the reasons the conference has been as dominant as it has been recently.

And finally, Alabama and Clemson are The Andy Griffith Show. When I was 8 years old, I woke up Christmas morning to find a color tv in our living room.

The first show that was on when I turned the power on was Andy Griffith. Being eight and not realizing that the show was filmed in black and white, I thought the tv was broken and automatically became upset until my parents changed the channel.

Point being, we all came into this season expecting to see something different, but Clemson continues to dominate a less than impressive ACC, and the one team I thought might be able to defeat Alabama, Georgia, could only hang for a half. (For what it’s worth, I think Georgia is closer to Alabama than the final score showed, but they’re not there, yet,)

We’re basically in the middle of a five-year tv marathon starring Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney, and we’re not in a position to just be able to change the channel.

It’s easy to look at these things I’ve mentioned and think they’ll change once everyone starts playing, but I don’t believe they will.

The Top 25 will still be difficult to rank based on the disparity of games played, you’ll continue to see high scoring games in the SEC, and in the end it will all come down to Alabama and Clemson. Even Barney Fife knows that.