The Problem with Polls

We have a problem with polls only because they decide the NCAA Football Championship. In sports with real championships, polls are just silly things to start banter among fans. In college football, polls are life and death.

But, polls are 100% about perception. For instance, when UCLA lost on a neutral floor to Michigan - who at the time was believed to be a terrible team - UCLA dropped from #4 to #10 or below and people still believed that Michigan was terrible. Most people thought UCLA was overrated at #4, and this loss fueled the fire. Everyone jumped off the bandwagon and Vitale and co. explained how they gave UCLA too much credit because of three straight Final Fours.

Then, Michigan beats Duke and Michigan moves into the top 25. However, because more than a week has passed, nobody re-evaluates their opinion of UCLA. So, UCLA dropped 8 or more spots because they lost to a "bad" team, but it turns out that the "bad" team isn't really bad after all.

When UNC loses at home to unranked Boston College, they dropped 2 spots. Why? Because every believed that they were the best and it was just a minor slip up on the way to a championship. Rather than question UNC, people bought into BC and BC moved into the rankings. What happened? BC loses to Harvard and UNC loses to Wake Forest.

Again, with basketball, it doesn't really matter. Rankings might affect seeds, but teams get to decide on the court who wins the championship and the champion has to beat somebody good. Plus, by the end of the season, there is a much larger sample size and the rankings tend to work out fairly accurately, though not perfectly.

However, in football, with a much smaller sample size, the rankings do not have time to work themselves out. So, perception rules.

USC lost on the road and played in a "bad" conference, so it was penalized more than Florida or Oklahoma who played in "good" conferences. All year, everyone bought the Big 12 kool-aid and believed Big 12 was far and away the best conference. So, an in conference loss in a close game only dropped a team a couple spots, while USC's loss dropped it straight out of the national championship discussion.

In reality, the Pac-10 was not bad, but young. Oregon State lost its first two games at Stanford and Penn State because its best player was a true freshman running back. It's tough to win on the road against a good team relying so heavily on a freshman. But, four games into the season, he had adjusted to the speed of the game and was ready for USC. Plus, the game was at OSU.

But, perception ruled. People change their voting biases in the year too. When so many voters changed their votes in the last pole because they felt Texas deserved to be ranked ahead of Oklahoma, they were voting based on teams deserving something rather than voting for the best teams. If anyone deserved anything, it was Utah, the only undefeated team. How do you vote OU ahead of Texas in one week, watch them destroy Missouri and then vote Texas ahead of OU the following week? Sure, Texas deserved to be in the national championship game ahead of OU because they beat OU on a neutral field and lost to Texas Tech on the last play of the game on the road. But, strictly from a consistency of voting perspective, how can you change that vote in one week?

If voters voted by who they thought was the best team, they would have voted USC 1 or 2. But, it's as if the voters want to penalize USC for "taking a week off" while forgetting that Florida lost to Mississippi and Oklahoma lost and Texas lost, etc.

But, again, the perception is that those are "better" losses than a road loss in the Pac-10 to a 9-win team. It's all perception. It's not based on facts or any objective measures.

And, as long as this subjectivity decides the bowl match-ups, subjectivity should decide the national champion. Because, as much as people want to say that Florida won it on the field, did they really? They won it in the polls and that gave them an opportunity to play probably the fifth most deserving team in the national championship (Florida, Utah, USC and Texas).

If someone voted USC fifth in the final polls, and then watched them destroy Penn State and felt they were the best team, why shouldn't the subjectivity continue? After all, it was his subjectivity in the first place that prevented USC's appearance in the national championship game.

Finally, I am tired of hearing about a play-off interfering with the education of the NCAA's student-athletes. Football has one of, if not the shortest season of any college sport. Does the NCAA care about the education of its baseball players who start their season in February and end in late June?

If Division II schools, which are closer to true student-athletes than the borderline professionals playing in the BCS games, can manage a play-off, why is DI football the only NCAA sport without a play-off? Hiding behind education is a cop-out. If education is so important, why allow Wednesday and Thursday games which interrupt the students' class schedules? Oh, that's right, because schools make money for playing those mid-week games.