Watch the games, not the polls

As playoff season  rises, so are the nerves in the state.

With rising nerves and increasing stakes, often that energy gets focused on things that ultimately are small. A lot of that focus has been turned to the polls.

Whether its in football or volleyball, there’s quite a few fans who have gotten worked up about rankings.

Polls are a mainstay in our business for a lot of reasons.

First, and probably most importantly, they’re easy to compile. Get a few sports writers or coaches together, have them list their version of the top teams in the state, then make an average of those lists.

Second, is the reason they exist, ostensibly to give a reasonable view of the top group of teams in a given area. Our area just happens to be the fifth largest state in the union with a variety of schools with a variety of styles and a variety of scheduling.

Because of both those reasons, the polls are valuable to figure out whether a given win is big or small. It helps writers and fans on one side of the state gauge teams on the other side of the state. It helps everybody put things into perspective.

However, as the season drags on, and teams get more established, so do opinions.

Fans feel their team, which they’ve watched all season, should be higher. Others have seen big wins go unrewarded and wonder why. Others still feel their team is being slighted for what happened in previous years and their team isn’t being given credit for the present. And then there’s fans of the teams on top who couldn’t understand why you would vote any differently.

And you know what? They’re all right.

Your team likely isn’t getting enough praise. Or it’s getting all the praise it deserves. It could be the best team in the state being punished for an early loss or a tough schedule. It probably isn’t being given credit for something and something the polls may be reactionary from week to week.

It’s all true. Or not. Because they don’t really count.

As fun as polls are, as useful as they can be to gauge competition, they don’t measure into the playoffs.

That’s why Glacier football has the possibility to be ranked No. 1 all season in football and is likely to get the No. 2 seed in the playoffs. It’s Whitefish and Columbia Falls football are unranked despite two of the best resumes in Class A. It’s why Glacier volleyball is No. 3 in a coaches poll that tends to favor Eastern schools.

It matters. It matters to players and programs looking for validation of a great season. It matters to fans looking to pull an upset and put a number on it. It matters to those trying to judge teams on paper.

It just doesn’t matter on the field.

Helena High finished the football season ranked No. 1 two years ago and lost in the first round to a Bozeman team that was unranked.  

This season, Glacier volleyball could reasonably win the state championship despite being ranked below Billings Senior all year.

Maybe it stems from a century of college football being decided by the polls. National championships were handed out based on a shifting range of metrics and national perception. Even now, as high-level college football moves away from the former system, it doesn’t matter at the next level either.

In the end, like any good book, it’s hard to wait for the end when the chapters leading up to it have been so exciting. Even as every nerve in your body wants to peek, it’s always worth it to find out how the ending came to be.

The polls offer a peek, but they don’t show the ending. Getting worked up now won’t change that.