DOWN WITH THE RANKINGS.

Byline: STEVE DILBECK

I have come up with an idea that I fully expect everyone in the country to completely get behind.

Let's take all the No.1 rankings of every sport, along with all things related to Paris Hilton, dump them into the great toilet bowl of American pop culture and give it the most cleansing of flushes.

Miss you like boy bands.

Athletics are so littered with confounding and completely unnecessary rankings as to make the sports world navigable only by someone still big on the abacus.

Every sport acts as if it must be validated by rankings. If it doesn't have a No. 1 team, it might as well be in T-ball, although the 5-year-olds are reportedly in arms at not having their own No. 1 team.

With the possible exception of college football, all these rankings don't mean a single thing.

Every tennis writer who wastes valuable newspaper ink rambling about how if Suzie Smith just advances to the quarterfinals of the next tournament, she'll take the No. 1 world ranking should be hung by their little carpel-tunnel thumbs and forced to listen to a Tom Arnold monologue.

It does not matter.

Worse, rankings often defy belief, or at least the element of that still borders on credibility.

Lindsay Davenport is currently the No. 1 female tennis player in the world.

Anybody wonder about that? Davenport hasn't won a Grand Slam event in five years. She just lost in the Wimbledon final to Venus Williams (No. 8), who has never been ranked No. 1.

That would include 2000 and 2001, when Williams won the U.S. Open and Wimbledon. In tennis rankings, players get points for playing in each tournament, so if Williams decides to pass on certain tournaments to go on another shopping spree, her ranking falls - even if at the time everyone knew she'd be favored to win any tourney she entered.

The No. 1 player at the end of the year doesn't receive any sort of award. No trophy, no plaque, no golden ticket to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

Sometimes the best player is ranked first, like on the men's tour, with Roger Federer, but it almost feels coincidental. Do we really need some artificial ranking to tell us Federer is the best player in the world?

Tennis is a lot like golf. There's seemingly a tournament every weekend, meaning every week players get to prove who's best. The course doesn't care if you're ranked first, eighth or 128th.

Even NASCAR has rankings, but just because he's the No. 1 driver doesn't mean Jimmie Johnson gets to start in front every week.

The NCAA has rankings for its sports - in case you missed it, Northwestern had the No. 1 women's lacrosse team - but the NCAA also has playoffs for every sport except Division I football. All the top teams are invited to play, and then earn their sport's final No.1 ranking. Cal State Fullerton was the No. 1 college baseball team most of the season, but that didn't translate into a trip back to Omaha for the College World Series.

Division I football is the only NCAA sport currently without a playoff system, so a team must be ranked first or second to play in the national championship game.

The Associated Press' college football poll is probably the most legitimate in existence, but the AP recently removed it from the ultra-contrived process of selecting the two teams that advance to the championship game.

NCAA football, of course, has its own bizarre strategy - the Bowl Championship Series - which is only slightly more mind-numbing than an evening spent listening to your grandmother explain the virtues of proper soil cultivation for the apothecary rose.

Now you may find benefit in learning what Consumer Reports' No. 1-rated minivan is, but do we really need a No. 1-ranked golfer? Can't he just win this weekend?

A Yahoo! search on ``No. 1'' turned up 1,970,000,000 hits. The first listed site of the No. 1s was Iranian.com, which is apparently the site of a 20-year-old Iranian singer/rapper.

There was also the No. 1 Chinese food, and the No. 1 left-handed reliever born on a Tuesday from North Dakota whose second language is pig Latin.

Enough already. Our entire society is overrun with everyone and their 8-year-old AYSO midfielder trying to be No. 1.

Don't care. Don't need it. Means next to zippo.

Exactly where is the legitimacy in naming the No. 1 high school football team in the country? We're not even sure if our top Division I team can beat the top Division II team, let alone whether an unbeaten high school team from Texas can knock off an unbeaten team from Washington.

There are cable TV shows that do nothing but count down sports lists, all leading up to a No. 1 whatever that has all the credence of saluting the No. 1 dry cleaners in America.

Boxing can't even begin to figure it out. In the alphabet soup that runs professional boxing, the four different organizations have four different unimpressive heavyweight champions (WBA: Vitali Klitschko, WBC: John Ruiz, WBO: Lamon Brewster, IBF: Chris Byrd), although two (WBA, WBC) actually have the same No. 1 contender (Hasim Rahman).

For the most part, professional team sports are spared all this, although most major newspapers - this one included - insist on rankings that dub a No.1 team in the NBA, MLB, NFL and, back in its day, NHL.

The NFL does have its No. 1 quarterback, devised by a mathematical equation understood only by advanced graduates of Caltech.

Just stop it. Worry about the top-rated tax write-off for 2006. Fixate on the No. 1 tip for inner peace.

Just spare us the volumes on the No. 1 sports this or that. Teams and athletes will determine it on the field. That's where it makes sense.

Please don't argue. I am the No. 1-ranked columnist in the Milky Way.

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo:

Lindsay Davenport is the world's No. 1 female tennis player despite being five years removed from a major tournament win.

Odd Andersen/Getty Images