Let’s take a minute to collectively laugh at the nation’s college football experts.

I’m talking about a good, hearty chuckle from the depth of the diaphragm, directed at those who vote in the AP and USA Today/Coaches polls.

The football season is four weeks old and once again the pundits have helped prove that preseason polls are worthless and should be scrapped for good.

Polls serve no purpose early in the season, other than to celebrate the overrated and those who captured the hearts of men during America’s monthlong couch-sitting competition (otherwise known as bowl season).

If Iowa’s famous Tate-to-Holloway touchdown pass had fallen incomplete in the Capital One Bowl, would anyone have even considered the Hawkeyes to be a potential top-10 team?

Already, two teams from the AP and three from the coaches poll’s top-10 have fallen from the rankings – all of them traditional powers.

Michigan was ranked No. 4 in both preseason polls, while Oklahoma was fifth in the coaches poll and seventh in the AP. Iowa was ranked No. 10 in the coaches poll and has plummeted out of the rankings after losses to Iowa State and Ohio State.

All three teams have two losses and are facing serious questions about the direction their seasons will take.

Down years at both Michigan and Oklahoma could be seen a mile away, yet there they were sitting in prime poll positions when their seasons began. Oklahoma might be lucky to make a bowl and Michigan will win only if their defense can make a stop.

Traditional powers are getting ranked not on merit, but on their storied success.

Although Michigan, Iowa and Ohio State received all of the preseason attention in the Big 10, the conference’s best team may end up being Michigan State.

The Spartans beat No. 13 Notre Dame on the road, then rolled Illinois 61-14 to begin conference play. An Oct. 8 game at Ohio State is all that stands between Michigan State and a trip to a BCS bowl game.

Notre Dame is another example.

The Irish received just one vote in the preseason AP poll, but have climbed into the top-15 thanks to wins over then-No. 23 Pittsburgh and a Michigan team ranked third at game time.

In all, the eight teams that were ranked in the AP poll to begin the season have fallen out, while seven teams in the preseason coaches poll are no longer ranked.

Now that I have proven that preseason polls are, as a friend put it the other day, bunk, one question remains: What should be done about it?

Sean Keeler wrote in Tuesday’s Des Moines Register there should be a preseason poll in August and then nothing more until three full weeks into the season. Three games is what it takes before someone can objectively rank a team, Keeler argued.

He’s right. But take it one step further.

No preseason poll at all. It’s not needed.

Three full weeks of play to let teams get tuned up and then come out with rankings. The season’s first poll would have come out before last weekend’s games, giving a clearer, more unbiased slate of picks.

Michigan and Iowa would have still been ranked, but they would have been legitimate teams placed in the 20s, not inflated top-10 selections.

– Grant Wall is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Fort Dodge. He is the sports editor of the Daily.