re: Polls say Tigers are better, but are they?

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I should point out I know voters who do their due diligence. One, who works for a major newspaper, didn't drop Cal nearly as far this week as other voters did. He says he won't raise Cal as much as others might should Cal rebound with a strong season, because he never punished them severely in the first place.

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Your friend might do his due diligence, but he's not very smart. Or fair. Or humble. He thinks his studying of their 3rd string DL in the spring is more important than the actual games on the fricking field? Get real. Two more points:

1) ESPN/ABC use USA Today rankings to promote their games. What are they going to use in September?

2) The Coaches poll almost always mirror the AP, and the Harris almost always mirrors the other 2. Holding off until October is not going to help this. It might actually make it worse as they'll almost definitely use the AP as a guide now.



There's nothing wrong with preseason polls in and of themselves. The problem is with the fricking morons who vote in the them. They are the problem, not the polls.

I agree as well that there should be no early polls, but like everything else, money drives the wheels, and the polls will not go away.

As long as the poll released on Dec 6th is good, I don't care what the other 15 or so polls say.

Good piece once again, Carl.
Gotta tell you, pre-season, crazy early-season polls and rankings are never going away. And not just the AP and USA Today polls. They've got the top recruiting class polls, the Heisman favorite rankings, the "mock draft" predictions, the "BCS Buster" polls, conference power rankings, "which conference is the best" polls, and oh yeah, point-spreads, etc., etc.

It's the beast that must be fed & it starts much earlier than each September. And Richt knows damn well how these polls work and how to work the system. Two years ago, Georgia bitched & moaned after LSU made the title game w/2 losses (as many as his team had, though they couldn't win their own division), anointed themselves with street-cred the entire off-season because they defeated unbeaten pretender Hawaii in a bowl game. Sure enough, Ga. got its No. 2 pre-season ranking (how'd that work out?). This year it was Ole Piss at No. 4. And you think LSU doesn't deserve that spot?

Look, they gotta do everything possible to promote TV games, pay-per-view, DVD box sets, magazines, video games, fantasy leagues and websites and blogs. As we all well know, this is the instant-information (and here we are on TR, which is great), instant-gratification, flavor-of-the-second age.

And it actually gets worse as the regular season comes to a close, with teams' "resumes" (when did that word gain so many definitions?), "style points" and BCS coaches screwing with their votes to boost their teams' and their conferences' rankings and shut out others--which coaches then use to advance their shameless lobbying and recruiting through the media.

All this b.s. is 24/7/365, and almost worse than the current health-care reform debate, with big-money driving everything and certainly (thanks, Les) just as disingenuous.
Trainer: "How many fingers am I holding up, Timmy?" Tebow: "Uh, orange?" Meyer: "Timmy said, 'It's great to be a Gator!'"

Apologies to the award winning chicken and his staff for posting this in a separate thread a few minutes ago.

Below is from the Dubois blog today:

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I'm on record as being anti-poll in most circumstances, and especially before October.

After the 2003 football season, which ended with LSU as the BCS national champion and USC as the AP national champion, I wrote a column saying the AP needed to get out of the championship business.

If the AP didn't disband its poll, I said, it should at least take steps to remove its poll from the BCS formula. The AP and many of its writers and broadcasters were covering news they were helping to create, and that was wrong.

My boss got a call from AP. He told me AP assured him it would continue with business as usual. But a funny thing happened before the 2005 season: The AP, acting as if it suddenly realized the BCS had been using its poll in the BCS standings formula for years, sent a cease-and-desist letter basically saying, "Whoa. You're using our poll? Shame on you! Stop that now or we'll have to take legal action."

So, the BCS removed the AP poll and replaced it with a new poll, the Harris.

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One of the things I found interesting from this discussion is what it didn't explicitly mention. It seems to me somewhat obvious it was to the disadvantage of teh AP to be considered merely one component of the BCS poll... esp when the BCS is the poll that gets to pick the top two teams for a championship game and settle it on teh field.

In years gone by of course it primarily just the AP and the coaches' polls that decided the final rankings and who was the "champ" (or at least #1 ranked team in their poll at the end of the season).

What I failed to understand was actually Dubois' logic in arguing against the AP being a part of the BCS poll though. Certainly it is a conflict of interest for members of the media to rank teams they cover more or less during the year... but that conflict of interest is hardly removed by taking it out of the BCS formula. Rather the problem is there is an AP poll at all.

Yes, they are.