Why has college football come to this?

It’s a sport so proud of its pageantry, its tradition and its honesty.

Well, a sport so proud of its pageantry and its tradition.

Now the latest craze is clamping down and holding people accountable for missteps.

Oregon senior tailback LaGarrette Blount, sit out your senior season because you lost your mind after a loss.

Jeremy Jarmon, sorry, we know taking that supplement was a mistake. But you gotta go.

Steve Spurrier, we know your SID didn’t vote for Tim Tebow in the preseason All-SEC poll. It’s OK; just change it.

If coaches and players can be held accountable for their mistakes — whether or not a mistake is consciously made — so should one group increasingly depended upon to guide college football every week: the media.

But why has it come to this?

Every week, 60 media members vote in the Associated Press top 25. This much you already know. And since the AP poll is no longer part of the BCS formula, some may wonder what utility the poll has left, other than that of another set of opinions to muddle and bias the action on the field every week.

But the AP poll’s influence is still very real. Since college football game times are not announced until a week or two prior to the game, TV coverage depends greatly on rankings.

And for whatever reason, most TV stations choose to use the AP poll to make those types of decisions.

That’s all fine and dandy if the fans can trust the voters. But they can’t.

Thankfully, the AP discloses each ballot so fans can see how media members vote. Most of the ballots are pretty bland. Florida at No. 1, Texas No. 2 … no curveballs.

Doug Lesmerises didn’t get the memo.

Lesmerises, reporter for the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, may have put thought into his polls; he may have drawn names out of a hat.

He may have outsourced his voting duties a la Spurrier.

What he didn’t do was responsibly choose a top 25 based on how teams played in the first week.

Without putting words in his mouth,  any reasonable fan with a general knowledge of how teams played last weekend can find bones to pick in Lesmerises’s ballot.

Some of his picks you can argue. He chose Florida as No. 4, which one could argue (although I won’t). His top three were Alabama, Brigham Young and Oklahoma State.

His most curious choices came near the bottom of his poll.

South Carolina, unranked and undetected on any national radars, beat North Carolina State, 7-3. This game was the first game of the season, so it gained plenty of attention. If Lesmerises were a responsible voter, he would’ve at least heard about how this game played out.

It was sloppy, it was brutal — but it wasn’t good brutal, like Vince Lombardi played. It was bad brutal, like the Detroit Lions played in 2008. Spurrier’s visor tosses seemed more effective than any throw either quarterback threw that night.

Yet Lesmerises awarded South Carolina with a No. 23 ranking. He ranked the Gamecocks over — get this — his No. 25, Oklahoma.

His No. 24 was Colorado State, victors over Colorado, a team believed to finish no better than fourth in the lightly competitive Big 12 North.

Even with Oklahoma QB Sam Bradford out, wouldn’t you rather watch the Sooners than the Gamecocks? Or Colorado State, for that matter?

The AP poll is an effective avenue for pollsters to speak their minds. But if a ballot challenges every last semi-conventional thought on how teams should be ranked, it’s not helping the system.

And here I thought the BCS was the problem.

Why has it come to this?