Idiots Write About Sports

At some point I will rant more about how it’s unethical to rely on polls to decide the college football match-ups (despite the fact that Cal was fourth in both polls, and sixth in the computer average), because coaches have a financial benefit to voting for teams in their conference, and because journalists improperly become part of the story by voting in a poll with actual power. I will also rant a bit about neutering computer polls by removing scoring from their calculations.
But on this black day, I contribute a link to this USA Today story, which details in a chart just what happened to Cal’s and Texas’ votes in the coaches’ poll this week.
One amusing coach elevated Cal to 3rd this week, which is pretty audacious. Cal lost 12 4th-place votes, which isn’t too surprising. But what’s shocking is this: Cal gained one 5th place vote, not 12. It gained four 6th place votes, four 7th place votes, and two 8th place votes. So basically, there are approximately ten coaches out there who decided to give Cal the shaft, as roughly as possible.
Texas, meanwhile, appeared second on one ballot (consistent from week to week, but still laughable — Mack Brown, is that you?), 3rd on three (for a positive gain of two — hear that, Auburn?), gained 10 4th-place votes and lost 10 5th place votes (pretty straightforward), and had some minor upward movement in 6th place. All without playing, which is the funniest thing of all.
All I’m saying is, people in both polls were making votes tactically. And if that’s happening, it’s time to scrap the poll system. Let the computers judge everything. Or eliminate the BCS restrictions for any match-up other than #1 vs. #2. At the very least, though, the ballots of every single coach should be publicly available.
Finally, I hope Joe Paterno split his first-place vote three ways as a joke or protest. If he was serious, they need to take Joe Pa’s vote away.
Update: ESPN has picked up an AP story about the Pac-10 and Tedford calling for a release of the anonymous, free-to-game-the-system coaches’ poll votes. Unlike the AP poll, which featured no votes for Cal lower than 6th, the coaches’ poll had six votes for Cal at 7th or 8th.

AFCA president Grant Teaff said the ballots from the final coaches poll will not be released. He said he didn’t believe there was anything suspicious about the final voting.
“We do very good due diligence to run a credible poll,” he said. “I understand their obvious concerns. I’m not oblivious to that.”
The AFCA asked its 117 Division I-A members in February if it wanted to make the votes public and they overwhelmingly voted against it.
The 61 coaches participating this season were asked again about a month ago if they would be willing to have the final ballot made public, and it was voted down again.
“That’s the way we’re playing the game and we’re not going to change the way we play it in the middle of the game,” Teaff said.

Seems pretty simple to me. If the ACFA won’t open up their system, so that coaches have to answer for their votes, then they need to be dropped from the BCS formula. Without accountability, the potential for malfeasance in the voting is far too great.
Personally, I think both polls have gone from being cute ways to start arguments about which team is the best in the land, to high-stakes tools that can be used to game the system and generate whatever results a voting bloc prefers, regardless of the reality of the situation. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me that those six coaches weren’t putting Cal 7th or 8th because they wanted to knock them out of the Rose Bowl, and put Texas in their place. But I guess we’ll never know for sure.
The BCS is big on mathematical tinkering. Maybe it’s time they consider something a bit more radical: dramatic changes to the system of polling used to add a “human element” to their system. What that would be I don’t know. I’d start with making every ballot public. I’d probably also propose some sort of representative committee, so that a balanced, responsible set of voters were making judgments, rather than a group of absentee coaches and their power-tripping flunkies.
Or better yet, I’d go with Pat Forde: ditch the BCS altogether. Or, failing that, beginning in 2006 have the only BCS bowl be the national championship, and allow all the other bowls to revert to their old methods of selecting bowl teams. But something fundamental’s gotta give.