I doubt that there is any football team that varies as much in its performance as ours. Watching a football game at Vandy is similar to watching a magician perform: Sometimes the magician dazzles the audience by pulling a rabbit out of a hat, and other times the magician merely throws itching powder in your face. Watching a Vandy game is both an exhilarating and a nerve-racking experience.

What irks me more than that, however, is how poorly the rankings match up with the truth. LSU is ranked somewhere around 10th in the nation despite the fact that they only had a small victory over Washington last week. We, in contrast, are not ranked in the top 25 despite our bowl game win last year and our landside victory over Western Carolina. Without a doubt, Western Carolina is not in the league of teams like University of Florida; however, they aren’t much worse than Washington, and we sent them home crying without a single point.

This makes me wonder: how important are rankings? We live our lives around these cumbersome things. We take standardized tests to rank students, we buy cars based on rankings made by people we don’t know, and some of us choose where to go to school based on USA Today’s college rankings. However, determining intrinsic value is not so simple as assigning arbitrary numbers and then ordering things based on those numbers.

So why do we do it? Stepping back for a moment from this discussion, imagine a picture of a street map. Almost all the streets create nice little squares out of the surrounding area. Sure neighborhoods exist where people (who I am not particularly fond of) create loops and curves so confusing that I still get lost trying to find my friends’ houses, but those loops and curves are surrounded by a bigger square. The same is true in farming. Sometimes farmers grow crops in a circular watering pattern are located inside square plots of land. As humans we need order and cannot live without it.

Following this reasoning, the natural thing would be to assign values to everything. We even assign values to people and have been doing it for ages. Gladiators in ancient Rome were bought for a certain amount of money, implying that they were worth as much as they were paid. Although people are not traded like common commodities in the modern-day United States, income determines social standing and thus we have another measure of a person’s worth.

In my experience, rankings are moot. The system exists today for the same reason it did when Romans were watching gladiators in the Coliseum: The people who have power attained it utilizing the ranking system, so there is no reason they would ever want it to change. There are many people (college professors) who are 10 times smarter than some CEOs but get paid 10 times less. What I mean to say is, the system is screwed.

—Phil Ingram is a senior in the College of Arts and Science. He can be reached at philip.d.ingram@vanderbilt.edu.