COLLEGE FOOTBALL
Magazines turn page on UB football
It’s not that Anthony Gimino dislikes the University at Buffalo football program, but he’s going to cheer for the Bulls’ opponents this season more often than not. In a sense, his credibility depends on the Bulls losing.
Gimino is the senior editor of Lindy’s Magazine, one of a slew of preseason annual football publications that saturate the market. And before Bulls fans flood Gimino with calls and e-mails, he wants to point out something about UB’s ranking.
“They should have been a little bit higher from where we ranked them,” he said. “I’m not entirely comfortable with how we ranked them, but then again if you change them, then you’ll be moving someone else down and I don’t feel comfortable with that, either.”
Lindy’s picked the Bulls to finish in seventh place in the Mid- American Conference East Division and 110th overall but upon further review . . .
“I wish [the rankings] all came with a disclaimer,” he said, laughing. “I could have 250 words explaining the way we did it, but there’s not room for that in the magazine.”
Yet according to the detailed scoring system compiled by Chris Stassen, a software consultant from New Jersey who 15 years ago began comparing the accuracy of all the preseason magazines’ predictions, Lindy’s is the best in the business.
Stassen. com’s rankings from 1993-2007 ranks Lindy’s first followed by Street & Smith’s, Athlon, GamePlan and the Sporting News. Last year, Athlon was first followed by Lindy’s while the Sporting News and Southern College Sports were tied for third.
In previous seasons, the Bulls could be found in the cellar of the MAC in nearly all preseason annuals, but after a breakthrough 5-7 season in 2007, UB is all over the board. UB’s highest ranking is third place in the MAC East in both Athlon and Blue Ribbon. The consensus is that the Bulls will finish fifth in the East behind Miami (Ohio), Bowling Green, Kent State and Temple, but ahead of Ohio and Akron.
Because of the competition, accuracy in terms of predictions is taken seriously.
“We picked Georgia No. 1 this year, so I’m going to be a big Georgia fan,” Gimino said. “And that extends to the small conferences too. Like in the Mid-American Conference if we picked a team third and they’re playing a team we picked fifth, suddenly I’m a fan of the team we picked third.”
Prognostication is a tricky business. Everyone whiffed on UB last year — the highest forecast was a fifth-place finish by Gold Sheet — and no one expected Kansas and Illinois to challenge for anything.
“There’s always one or two teams that start the season unranked and move into the top 10,” Gimino said. “No one picks those, it just doesn’t happen. You always go back and say, ‘Man, I wish I had seen that coming.’ ”
Ranking the Top 25 is a process that begins not long after the Bowl Championship Series national title game is completed. Lindy’s, for example, ranks teams 1 to 119, a process that takes weeks.
“We have writers responsible for each conference,” Gimino said. “They rank the team 1-12 in the Big 12 or 1-11 in the Big Ten. I’ll put them all together on a big Excel chart. Then I’ll talk to my conference guys to get a feel for where teams should fit in nationally. You sort ’em and sort ’em and sort ’em and sort ’em until you get something that you like. If you did it 100 times, it might come out 99 different ways.”
