Do me a favor, OK? Take this last weekend in college football and stick on the side of your freezer. Use one of those cute refrigerator magnets to keep it at eye level, in a prominent space, maybe next to that yellowing Family Circus cartoon that’s been there since the Clinton Administration, the one that you honestly can’t remember why you thought it was cute or funny at the time.

Just as long as it’s in a place not likely to get knocked off.

You want it there for next July and August, when you’re getting angry/optimistic/fire-breathing mad at the slew of preseason polls and predictions that will come out.

I caution you about this every summer, you’ll recall, mostly to deaf ears and a steady chorus of yeah-buts.

Yeah, but next summer you’ll have the handy reminder to pay it no mind. Right there on the fridge, proof positive that preseason magazines don’t know squat and nobody — no matter how many Twitter followers they may have — is doing anything but putting on false authoritative airs and blindly guessing.

Just remember this past whacky, crazy long weekend, the bizarre one that got warmed up on Thursday with Oregon’s whoopee cushion, did a Friday Utah State toe-tap on BYU and then completely came apart at the seams on a Kate Perry Saturday gone completely bonkers.

Remember how simple it all looked back in the summer, running a finger down a schedule — W, W, Maybe, W, Probable L … ?

That was back when the college football professors, with properly furrowed brows (they take this stuff way too seriously), wondered if a one-loss team could make it into this new four-team playoff thingamajig and, of course, the implications thereof and henceforth forever more.

That was back when the SEC seemed to be smugly advance lobbying to remind everyone that there was no bylaw forbidding two teams from one conference getting into the thing.

That was back when Uncle Les was soothing a lot of LSU concerns with assurances that he’d stumbled onto a magic elixir that cured freshmanitis and made teenagers play and act like full-grown SEC adults.

Of course, that was also back when the SEC’s biggest concern was if anybody could derail the steam-rolling Alabama dynasty, especially since Auburn had probably only further angered Nick Saban with that Kick Six silliness last November.

It was when the Pac-12 was doing a lot of posturing and mostly pointing toward Oregon.

It all seemed pretty cut and dry, didn’t it?

Then, when the sun rose Sunday morning (most likely from the West), the very hung over state of Mississippi — at least what was left of it after all-night parties and arrests in Oxford and Starkville — was the epicenter of the college football universe.

Two SEC teams in the playoff?

If it began today (it doesn’t) and if it followed the lead of the polls (it won’t, but play along for now), you’d not only have three from the SEC (none of them coached by Saban), but two from the state of Mississippi.

Has the world fallen completely off its axis?

Ole Miss and Mississippi State don’t even like to be seen in each other’s company let alone share the No. 3 spot in The Associated Press Top 25 poll, which is so weird you couldn’t make it up, but also the cover of Sports Illustrated, which isn’t quite the jinx it used to be.

Actually, there were some summer rumblings that both were up to something. But, sheesh, we’d heard that threat every couple of years and nothing ever came of it.

Between them they have exactly one appearance in the SEC title game and the last SEC championship to call Mississippi home was in 1963.

Yet Ole Miss knocked off mighty Alabama and it sure wasn’t a fluke and Mississippi State destroyed Texas A&M and it wasn’t close.

That was the tip of the iceberg. It was a plague upon the nation.

Three of the top-four ranked teams went down in flaming upsets, five of the top eight for that matter.

At least the two Mississippi teams were ranked. Two of the upsets came from outside the top 25, and TCU was No. 25 before whacking Oklahoma.

And check out the second 10.

Six teams, Nos. 14-19, were lined up and mowed down as nonchalantly as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Los Angeles got bombed by a second Hail Mary of the year, this one delivered from Arizona State to Southern Cal.

Mind you, this was one weekend. And most schools aren’t even to the halfway pole of the season.

So this week LSU plays at Florida and it’s decidedly off Broadway. And there’s OU-Texas, which this time might be the third biggest game in Texas on Saturday.

Forget Dallas. The real stories will come out of Waco (Baylor-TCU) and College Station (Texas A&M-Ole Miss).

There’s half a season to go and there’s nothing sillier — although we just did it — than figuring out the four teams for this playoff.

Many more weekends like this past one, however, and I’m guessing those 13 members of the CFP selection committee start sending in their resignations.

l

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU

athletics. Email him at

shobbs@americanpress.com(MGNonline)