If there’s anything to be learned from years of covering college football at the highest level is these summer rankings usually don’t mean a whole lot by the end of September.

Right now, Arkansas has five teams in ESPN’s Way Too Early Top 25 on the schedule … but how many will even be in the rankings by the end of September?

That’s when things will start to get interesting.

One thing Razorback fans can sort of count on is they’ll have an idea whether to get their hopes up by then or start looking forward to Eric Musselman’s first basketball team.

If this team hasn’t eclipsed last year’s two wins by the time everybody assembles in AT&T Stadium for the annual game with Texas A&M, then it’s a good bet it will be a thin group calling the Hogs at the end of September.

Thank you, Michigan. If a team ever needed some easy games in September this is it and they would be playing the Wolverines if they hadn’t cancelled the series to play Notre Dame.

Don’t talk about attractive home matchups. After the last two years, fans will take a win over anybody at home. It’s been that thin.

Outside of a few psychotic internet trolls, it’s not out of the realm of possibility the Hogs go to Arlington sitting at 4-0. Let’s be objective here, the game with Ole Miss in week two is a toss-up.

If the Aggies are, well, get ready for a dogfight in the SEC West because that means they will have beaten Clemson on the road and Auburn the week before.

The guess here is A&M, ranked No. 12 the early ESPN rankings, will be — at best — 3-1 and won’t have a chance to do any early preparations for the Razorbacks or they will be 2-2.

Auburn has some talent, but not a lot of playmakers at the positions that I’ve found to be the most imporant — playmakers.

By the time Gus Malzahn’s team heads to College Station, they could already have a loss (opening against No. 10 Oregon) and it’s already a paranoid atmosphere around what has become a completely dysfunctional program.

The Hogs have Kentucky, Auburn and Alabama in October and the only guarantee there is they won’t lose four games that month. The Crimson Tide will be one of the top two teams in the country at that point.

Auburn could be reeling. They play Oregon, Kentucky, Texas A&M and Florida before the Hogs and LSU the next week in Baton Rouge. Malzahn should get coach of the year, in my opinion, if he goes 8-4 this year, but it wouldn’t be shocking if he’s gone by Halloween.

The team most folks are discounting how far they slide is Kentucky, who hosts the Hogs on October 12. To me THAT is the game that’s going to tell us how this season could be.

The Wildcats lost their best playmakers on both sides of the ball to the NFL, which is something you couldn’t say very often about football in Lexington.

November is a month where the Hogs have Western Kentucky after an earlier matchup with Mississippi State. What Joe Moorhead does in his second year is up for debate, even with some fans in Starkville who are scratching their heads over eight wins with four players in the first 44 taken in the NFL Draft.

At the end is Missouri, a team that can’t go to a bowl game, lost starting quarterback Drew Lock, who personally beat the Hogs two of the last three years.

Last year, Arkansas just showed up in Columbia, but Lock led comebacks in 2016 and 2017 that effectively put the bookends on Bret Bielema’s tenure in Fayetteville. He didn’t have to perform any heroics last year.

And LSU.

A story broke Friday at Yahoo Sports about an LSU fan allegedly paying the father of a player a rather large sum of cash.

While it apparently doesn’t involve Ed Orgeron directly, he’s going to have to pay the price for it, regardless. Experience has shown just the NCAA’s snooping can crash a program more than any sanctions they hand out.

No, there won’t be a prediction here on number of wins this season. We haven’t even seen the players in T-shirts and shorts yet.

But it might not be as grim as many think right now.

During what former coach Steve Spurrier called “talking season,” many have taken to talking about SEC teams’ strength of schedule, which is borderline ridiculous.

Because they are in the league they have a mine field already strong enough.

Honestly, what do you want? In a world where getting to play for the championship is a popularity contest as much as anything, why anyone in the SEC would WANT to play a big time non-conference opponent is ridiculous.

In Arkansas’ case, they got a break a few years ago when Michigan paid off the UA so it could play Notre Dame. That meant they get some folks they can beat in a time of rebuilding.

Ranking the SEC’s schedules back in May, CBS Sports’ Tom Fornelli had a valid point that “Arkansas’ schedule gets a slight boost because, unlike its SEC West counterparts, the Hogs don’t have Arkansas dragging their SOS down a bit.”

Yes, it is at that level right now.

Still, it’s fourth in the league in the rankings behind South Carolina (they play Clemson, Alabama and Georgia in the same season), then Georgia (Notre Dame plus Auburn and Texas A&M from the West) and the Aggies are third (Alabama and road games against Georgia and Clemson).

Clemson could have more SEC wins than some teams in the league.

Alabama is dead last in the league’s strength of schdule with, uh, Duke as the headliner out of conference. Yeah, well, that’s what every coach in the league should be doing, in my opinion.

You can talk all you want, but in the end the strength of schedule doesn’t matter one little bit if you have two losses at the end of the year. There’s still no guarantee a two-loss SEC team will get into the four-team finale.

That includes an A&M loss to, say Clemson and Alabama, then the Crimson Tide stumbling twice in the league. That would put the Aggies in Atlanta and, based on the College Football Playoff’s selection history, they would be in a bowl game that didn’t matter.

It’s easy to say what the CFP SHOULD do, but there’s no precedent for them putting a two-loss team in the Final Four.

Under the previous scenario, for example, you can see where A&M wins a SEC title game matchup against an undefeated Georgia team and it’s the Bulldogs playing for a national title. While the CFP has conference title as a “factor,” it’s not a “requirement” for deciding anything.

Oh, I’m not saying there wouldn’t be a complete uproar in the league and across the college football world, but it’s a possibility I honestly could see happening.

It’s not out of character. Alabama won a national title in 2017 after not winning the league’s championship game, but deciding the league crown in the overtime win over Georgia.

You want more than four teams to play for the national championship? Let that scenario play out.

Which is, actually, good for college football.

It’s the one sport where there can be arguments made almost every single year that the best team didn’t win the national championship.

And it’s been that way for, oh, more than a century.

It’s also the biggest college sport for about the last 150 years or so. A lot of that popularity has been fueled by arguments about an arbitrary process for the history of the sport in choosing a national champion.

Do you think that’s an accident?