Come on, polls, you got to be better than this.

That’d be the college football top 25, we’re talking about — the two main ones — for now — the coaches poll and the AP media poll.

Yes, I know, they don’t mean a whole lot right now. They’ll mean even less once the College Football Playoff committee starts huddling with the rankings that really matter — this year more than ever with the CFP expanded to 12 teams.

They are merely preseason polls and chiseled in something less than granite. Although both are now in the public domain, as I understand it the colleges plan to go ahead and play out the schedules anyway.

But I don’t need a lecture right now.

It’s still college football’s “talking season” and those polls should be Ground Zero for verbal fisticuffs that could tide you over until real kickoffs, touchdowns and video reviews begin.

The polls are not doing their job.

Either the coaches or the media — more likely, both — have dropped the ball.

What’s to argue about?

Coaches and media shouldn’t have a lot in common. They should be coming at these rankings from totally different angles, even biases. Something befitting the bickering that’s not uncommon between the two warring factions.

Yet if you look at the two polls, it would appear that one would be plenty enough.

Georgia is No. 1 in both. Understandable. OK. No problem. A common narrative this offseason. Same for Ohio State at No. 2, maybe even the entire top five with Oregon, Texas and Alabama tagging along.

But, on closer examination, the two polls included the exact same 25 teams.

Not exactly the same order, top to bottom, but pretty close.

Probably just a coincidence.

Sadly, the media is going to have to take most of the blame here. The coaches poll came out well ahead of the media’s so it looks like the latter just rubber-stamped the earlier one.

Not likely. But even where they disagree, it’s negligible, not really worth fussing over.

The exact order of the two top 10s had one variance: Penn State is No. 8 in the media poll, defending champion Michigan No. 9; the coaches flip-flopped them.

Maybe LSU is embroiled in the closest thing to controversy you could stir up (spoiler alert: it ain’t much).

But the Tigers are No. 13 in the media poll, one spot behind No. 12 Utah. Again, just flip them and you’ve got the coaches’ version — LSU, then Utah.

Woo-hoo. Let the barroom melee begin.

OK, that could be important, of course, since 12 will now be the magic number to reach the playoffs, but not necessarily No. 12. Keep in mind, the playoff must include at least one team from the group of five conferences.

You won’t find any group of five teams anywhere in either poll. You will find nine SEC teams in both, along with six Big Ten teams, which doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room.

But if the power-conference teams want to be in that playoff field, then they’d have to be in the top 11.

Meanwhile, if both the media and coaches are going to let us down in the Talking Season, maybe the CFP could step in and tide over a football-hungry nation.

Let that bunch, whose picks mean something, honor us with a preseason poll.

They could wait until November before knocking out a second one, but, please, something, anything.

I’ve had the honor (burden?) to vote on the media poll off and on over the years. It’s certainly not an exact science.

Probably made some dumb rankings along the way.

But I’ll leave you today with my favorite poll-voting memory.

For this tale you have to go back aways. This would be before cell phones, before the internet, before email.

Any old-timers remember pay phones?

That’s the way it used to be done when you’d call the AP office in New York and recite your latest weekly top 25 to a guy on the national desk.

I guess I was on the outskirts of Starkville, Mississippi, one Sunday morning after covering a game the previous day when I located a pay phone outside a Sack-a-Suds-type convenience store.

I was dutifully relaying my rankings to New York as a kindly woman appeared in the wings, waiting to use the phone.

So I finished up, something like …

“22, Purdue, 23, South Carolina … 24, Fresno State … 25, Missouri.

“OK, thanks, talk to you next week …”

As I hung up, the nice lady waiting on the phone gave me a knowing smile and remarked:

“Hope you win all your bets.”

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com