Here is this week’s SFN poll.
Here’s to the Free-thinkers
It’s a good thing that we now have 4 human polls to select the best teams in the country. These guys have about as much open discourse as George Bush’s inner circle. Since the Master’s poll wasn’t out quite yet this week, I took a look at the other three and created my own poll, which I dubbed the BS Laziness poll. By the way, last week, the Master’s poll was a virtual carbon copy of the AP.
Following three easy steps, you too can be a college football pollster. First, sort all IA teams by their number of losses. Second add an extra loss to each non-BCS team and re-sort. Third, rank the teams with equal losses according to their preseason AP ranking. If the team was unranked, rank it amongst the other unranked teams by total wins.
What’s the result? The top 4 are exactly the same as the other polls. Six of the top 10 are exact and 9 of the top 10 are within one. ND, who was 24, didn’t make the BS top 10. This is the only real difference in the BS poll, and Notre Dame is statistically the most over-rated team in college football. If you flip-flop Wisconsin and Ohio St., the BS poll matches at least one of the 3 polls exactly from 11-15. The rest of the BS poll is pretty close with Ga Tech and UTEP replacing 3 loss Michigan and 2 loss Louisville, who fell out at 26 and 29 in the BS poll.
Why is this so frustrating? Last week, the Master’s poll, which didn’t start until late September came out with virtually the same results. What does this tell you? No one actually watches the games. They start with preseason rankings and use this move up/move down mentality essentially ranking the teams based on their records regardless of who they play or how they’ve performed on the field. Why bother playing the season? It seems that what matters most is how you are ranked in August.
The system stinks; the polls are biased; we need a playoff.
