College football polls: They're the scourge of diehard pigskin fans the nation over. (Well, except for the Northeast, where few seem to care about the beautiful game. Fools.) Fans love nothing more than to angrily rag on a pollster who ranked their team precisely seven spots too low, or who had the audacity to accidentally slot them below a team their team beat in Week 3. Normally, you would have to dismiss these as merely the rantings of supremely biased fans with way too much time on their hands to spend arguing anonymously in online fan forums and on sports talk radio.
In this case, though, it pains me to admit that these fans have got a pretty legitimate beef. College football polls are the only instance in sports in which what you actually did on the field takes a backseat to media perceptions — and this never fails to generate controversy on an annual basis.
Every professional league obviously has a coherent playoff system. College basketball has polls, too, but they hold much less sway than those in football, and the 64-team playoff gives every halfway decent team a shot at winning the championship. College football, on the other hand, has created a delightful little cartel known as the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), mainly to keep its lucrative partners happy. And, it seems, to piss off the viewing public. This system creates a two-team playoff every year, slotting a national championship game and nothing else.
The BCS standings, derived from a formula that at various points has included such variables as quality wins, strength of schedule and a Standardized Co-ed Attractiveness System, is now relatively simple: one-third Harris poll, one-third coaches' poll, one-third the average of six computer formulas. So basically, you have got three groups of people not playing football deciding which two teams play for the national championship.
Adding to the problem is the fact that the most respected and best poll, the Associated Press', is no longer part of the formula. The AP withdrew after controversy consumed the end of the 2004 season, when five teams finished undefeated (obviously, only two can play for the championship). This led the BCS to begin its own replacement poll, the Harris poll, made up mainly of obscure media figures and former college football players. The Harris poll is almost blandly similar to the coaches' poll on a week-to-week basis.
Especially in comparison with the AP poll, both of these polls are notoriously static, with little change on a weekly basis. Both polls also generally seem resistant to moving non-BCS conference teams up, even after wins or losses by teams above them.
Most embarrassing of all, however, is the basic idea of the coaches' poll. Who thought it was a good idea for coaches to vote on their own teams and the teams they're playing against? Could they have come up with a group that would be more obviously biased than the men whose jobs literally depend on what these polls say about them and their competitors?
There's a direct incentive to not only over-rank their own teams, but also teams in their own conference, to make themselves look better by comparison. Also, is there another group that more obviously isn't watching college football on Saturday? That's kind of their biggest day of the week, so, yeah: they might have other things on their mind than that poll they have to fill out by Sunday morning.
It's one of the worst-kept secrets in sports that just about every coach has their sports information director or some other low-level flunky in the athletic department fill their poll out for them. So, come on, college football powers-that-be, take some of the power away from the polls. Give us a playoff, and let teams decide the national championship on the field instead of in a sportswriter's office. At the very least, get rid of the idiotic coaches' poll.
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Ethan Frigon is a junior majoring in economics and International Relations. He can be reached at Ethan.Frigon@tufts.edu.
