I get the sentiment, but there are inherent advantages to starting the season being ranked as high as possible. There are too many (most) of the voters on the polls who simply move teams on their ballot from the previous poll based on that week's wins and losses rather than starting from scratch each week and ranking each team based on their performance so far. This creates inertia where a team who started highly ranked has to perform very poorly to exit the poll and a team who was lowly or not ranked has to perform very well to get ranked/move into the top ranges of the poll. There shouldn't be inertia in the poll but there is.
How often do we hear people screaming "Team X lost, they have to move down and Team Y won, they have to move up." Never mind that Team X may be ranked first and this is their first loss while Team Y is second and already has a loss. This is also why the SEC playing cupcakes in the waning weeks of the season is such a huge advantage even beyond it being a late, get healthy pseudo open week. Voters think they have to move a team down if they lose late to a good team even though their resume may be better than the team who played nobody that week and got a meaningless win.
www.espn.com
