Coaches Poll Changes= Bad News
by Longhorn11 on May 27, 2009 2:40 PM CDT
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According to this article on Espn, the final coaches poll will not be revealed. Isn't this a huge step backwards in the fairness of our current system? With such a lack of transparency, the coaches will be able to do anything they want with their votes, even if it is totally ridiculous (for instance, a coach putting Texas out of the top 10 this year to damage it's resume).
Am I correct in this assumption? If so, why in the world would this change be approved? If I'm totally off base here, please let me know, but this just sounds stupid to me.
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I have no idea why they are doing this.
I agree that this seems like a step backwards. Unbelievable.
by Wescott Eberts (GoBR) on May 27, 2009 2:45 PM CDT reply actions
I agree.
If they are voting fairly then who cares if everyone knows who they voted for?
The Ralphie Report - University of Colorado Athletics
*Head Scratch
The BCS is already under scrutiny and there’s a movement to make the system less transparent? Incredulous.
The why seems obvious
I don’t know if this is true, but if so, it is likely done at the insistence of coaches. In a secret ballot, they don’t have to answer questions, explain, or defend their rankings. They can even claim that with a secret ballot they don’t have any pressure to vote for friends or teams in their conference but can vote for the most deserving. As for me, I agree that the names should be released every week.
"Only angry people win football games." --DKR
So the story says that the coaches voted in 05 to make the ballots transparent
Does this mean that the coaches voted again to make them secret? Or was this imposed by the AFCA?
Second-Hand Poll: You could make the charge the coaches are incompetent.
As has been said many times, head coaches in-season just don’t have the time to watch many games, if any. All their information is second hand. Yeah, they have ideas, background info and perhaps good judgment, but the fact is they don’t watch the games.
They are thus incompetent because they can’t handle the information load necessary to make a sound judgment. Would you like a judge making a decision on your case when all he hears in hearsay information? Same story for most of the season.
Perhaps the last poll during bowl games is the only time when they do get to watch all the games. But one week of information don’t make up 16 weeks of incompetence, to paraphrase Willie.
You reporters with the access and the right to ask questions: They’re leaving the barn door open. Attacking on the basis of incompetence is about the best frontal assault you’re going to get. Get a mouth like Leach going on the subject. Push hard, reporters. Especially those here where the Big XII tiebreaker actually comes down to that Second Hand Poll. Wake everyone the hell up. There is something at stake here: you could actually do some good. Knock out a two-bit poll – unless they just want to do it for fun, which is all it is worth – and kill the damn tiebreaker rule as well.
And the rest of you bloghards need to get it up and go after this.
by whills on May 27, 2009 4:52 PM CDT reply actions 2 recs
How about a BCS Supreme Court?
Transparent or non-transparent, I’m not sure why we rely on the coaches to vote period…especially when we know half of them don’t even fill out the ballots themselves and none of them really have the time to make a good assessment because they’re too busy concentrating on their next opponent.
So if we can’t have a play-off, I’d love for each conference (BCS and Mid-Major) to nominate a "justice" to preside on a BCS court…like the current format, they’ll wait until halfway through the season and then start releasing a poll every week until the end of the season. Ultimately, they will decide the top 2 teams (and the rest of the BCS bowl match-ups as well if I had my way).
The 12 justices (or 13 if Notre Dame gets to submit one on behalf of independents) can use any means (gut feel) and take into account any information (computers) they deem relevant to deciding the rankings. Then the BCS will take the aggregate of their submissions and output a poll…so it doesn’t exclude things like the computer polls, it just doesn’t give them a direct say.
Ideally, those persons nominated for the BCS court would be extremely knowledgeable of the game, having spent several years immersed in it, and coming up with this poll would be their sole job/responsibility during the season.
I’d much rather have 12 or 13 guys who take it really seriously and know their role precisely than 150 who don’t really have the time to do it right or think their vote isn’t really that important.
Anyway, i know this idea will never fly, but I’d still like to see it happen.
Thoughts?
Be nobody but yourself in a world that desperately wants you to be like everybody else.
Id rather every school's Computer/Math department come up with a poll.
And have 150 something computer polls instead. Program them using whatever criteria you want, only rule is that it has to be set before the school year, and not changed until the next poll. Toss out the 50 top and 50 bottom rankings for each team, average the rest.
by BoddickerIsClutch on May 27, 2009 5:33 PM CDT up reply actions
I could get behind something like this...
generally, I think the more programs used, the more accurate the final result is likely to be. The key, as you noted, is that they set the criteria BEFOREHAND, and they cannot change it to suit themselves…
I don't get it
Why would 150 computer rankings be better? Assuming that the ones we have are among the best (which is why they are used), how does averaging them with a lot of inferior ones give a better result?
And as I’ve said before, none of them have ever been validated and they never can be because there are no independent rankings to use as criteria.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. If they get mad, you're a mile away AND you have their shoes.
Completely agree
Both polls, the Harris and Coach’s, suffer from either lack of football knowledge, ignorance, or both. For the Harris poll, it’s already been shown, to the embarrassment of the idiots of the BCS, that many voters don’t even watch the games, much less know a lick of football. For the coach’s poll, they undoubtedly know as much football as anyone, but they are ignorant because they don’t have the time to watch the games (and they shouldn’t; they should be watching their own team and the teams they play on film, and that’s it). They can also be swayed by bias and for other coaches that are within their own network.
The main problem I had with Oklahoma running the score was that I knew that many completely irresponsible, worthless, and idiotic voters would see their 60 points, see that nobody else scored sixty, and woodenly place OU at the top of their ballot. If I knew that there were people watching every game carefully and breaking them down, then I would not care so much, because then I would know there would be knowledgeable people who would know HOW Oklahoma got to sixty points through the course of the game. They would have known that the OU-OSU game was actually a pretty close game until the end, while the Texas-Mizzou game was a blowout from the get-go and Texas merely coasted. Thus, the only real issue that running up the score would have is the issue of sportsmanship; it wouldn’t work on voters who were watching the games and were knowledgeable, and thus, less coaches would even bother to think about doing it, especially if they felt the sportsmanship issue itself would make them lose favor among the knowledgeable voters.
This only makes sense. Since the BCS doesn’t make sense, they ignore this and keep their moron system. I know full well that a system based on computers and polls will never be perfect, but by golly, it can be much better than this. Because the BCS loves to be illogical, not only do they keep their polls, they once again try to shroud it in secrecy to protect their own hides.
I would love to find the BCS administrators, put them in front of a large crowd, and grill them with these type of questions. I would love to see them squirm in their stupidity.
by TheElusiveShadow on May 27, 2009 6:38 PM CDT up reply actions
WTH. This is lame.
"Football's so important in Texas. On the West Coast, it's a social. On the East Coast, it's a culture. Here, it's a religion."
-- Major Applewhite
The entire coaches poll should be abolished
How exactly are these people watching enough games to even be able to make an informed decision? Don’t they have, say, to watch game films 24-7 of the teams they’ll be PLAYING, much less watch other games? Ridiculous. The entire poll should be discontinued for sheer implausibility.
There was a coaches' poll that had the right idea
It was called the Master Coaches Survey. While their website is still up, they don’t seem to have updated it in over a year. The idea was to poll a number of respected retired coaches. Key word – retired. They actually had time to watch the games and spend some time analyzing them. While it wasn’t perfect (Gene Stallings was one of the coaches!) the idea seems to have merit. With some safeguards in place to prevent favoritism towards (or maybe against) former assistants or schools, I think this would be a big improvement over the curent coaches’ poll.
.
by Longhorn in Canada on May 27, 2009 10:34 PM CDT reply actions
The last line was kind of interesting
As a result of the Gallup World Poll study, the AFCA said it will also consider reducing the number of ranked teams to 10 or 15.
This would be an improvement in my opinion, the rankings get really arbitrary in the second half of the poll. Although this would make it harder for the other two teams I follow, Colorado and Maryland, to ever be ranked.
why in the world
would you root for the turtles??? their fans are atrocious, well maybe not so much in football, but basketball they act like they are UCLA or something… really made me dislike their whole fanbase.
I am currently a grad student at Maryland
While their football crowd is pathetic, their basketball crowd is on a different level compared to Texas. They give the student the first 10 rows around the entire court, plus the section behind one basket. My first game there was vs. Vermont (two unranked teams playing each other in November). The entire student section was full, and they stood, jumped and yelled the entire game. It was something you don’t see at Texas even when OU or Kansas come to town. So I will give them a pass for being a little overly confident.
While Maryland has not been back to its peak of 2002, but in the last 16 years they have been to the NCAA Tournament 13 times with seven Sweet Sixteen appearances, a two Final Four showings, and the 2002 national championship.
fair enough
I have not been to a md basketball game, I have only encountered their fans in the bars around DC. They were especially chippy after their loss in the NCAA tournament, they talked a ton of trash about texas basketball to me, but who isnt pissed after their team loses…
I did go to a football game, and it reminded me of going to an SFASU game…90% of the student body were in the parking lot next to the stadium getting absolutely trashed
Fixed to describe UT games
90% ofthe student bodyAustin were in the parking lot next to the stadium getting absolutely trashed
"From the waist down, Earl Campbell has the biggest legs I have ever seen on a running back." -John Madden
by run Bevo run on May 28, 2009 11:22 AM CDT up reply actions
Limiting it to 10 would likely pose a problem to the current system of qualification
At-large teams must be ranked in the top 14 while “Mid-major” conference teams get an automatic berth if in the top 12 or top 16 as long as they are ranked ahead of one of the automatic BCS conference champions.
15 votes would almost certainly guarantee that the system would work but 10 might pose a problem. You’d also run into the issue of whether or not the computer polls should only be able to submit votes for the top 10 or 15 as well.
I’d be interested in knowing why Gallup suggested reducing the votes in the first place. It does seem that the rankings in the second half become more arbitrary but I think it would take away a little bit of the excitement of collegiate football. I remember back to the times in the mid-90s when Texas would barely crack the Top 25 and how exciting it was. In some ways, that was more fun than sitting at the top of the polls and dealing with the BCS.
ou
I have a feeling the shady ou or Big 10 ties have something to do with this.
Yeah, right
Brown is so into “screwing” other teams, he can’t even bring himself to vote his own team #1.
"Only angry people win football games." --DKR
Maybe they should put on some restrictions
for one, you’re not allowed to vote your team, any of your opponents on your schedule, or any team in your conference in your top 25 at all. It could take away some bias, but not all obviously. Coaches have friends after all.
by goingforthecorner on Jun 3, 2009 6:29 PM CDT reply actions
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