Other CFB Poll ideas

Submitted by Yostal on

So BlogPoll is awesome, and I like that it has accountability, rules, and people who seem to watch/analyze/investigate a lot of games.

I was wondering if anyone else had a poll idea that they really would love to see and why they think it would work.

Mine has always been to give it to the Sports Information Directors/Departments of the schools.  They're generally the ones filling out the ballots for the coaches poll anyway, so why not just label it what it is?

Another notion which I would need to tinker with would be the Steele metric.  The idea is that you find a bunch of people, people who depend on information analysis of college football, to put together their ballots based on both what it says on paper and what they saw.  Maybe it wouldn't come out until Wednesday, but the idea would be that they would be more likely to have seen some things beyond the highlights.

Adam Jacobi of Black Heart, Gold Pants also had an interesting idea for overhauling the coaches poll which I encourage you to check out if you get a chance.

mGrowOld

October 19th, 2010 at 7:22 PM ^

More polls? Seriously? God I was hoping this post was calling for the elimination of about 15 of them - not the addition of more. College football is starting to look like boxing with all the governing bodies and polls they have in play.

Yostal

October 19th, 2010 at 7:54 PM ^

I guess implicit in my idea, without actually stating it (and for that, I apologize), was that these polls would serve to replace the existing system.  The AP poll will not go away, but the Coaches Poll is flawed because coaches really only see their teams and the teams they will be playing or have played.  The Harris Poll is just interesting in the voter list for 2010.  The Legends Poll is an interesting idea and has some interesting names, but it is under publicized.

I guess what I was thinking, was just the notion that if polls will exist, which I believe they will due to man's innate need to evaluate and rank, is can we get better polls than the one's we have.  That was all.

mGrowOld

October 19th, 2010 at 8:45 PM ^

I think the expansion of the current polls proves my point. In some ways they are like government programs that never truly "go away" but morph into something altogether different than what was originally planned. Your ideas for taking additional criteria into consideration are fine but imo you'll never get people making a subjective analysis to agree on what's important. One voter looks at Oregon and sees an explosive offense and another sees a team that can't stop anybody. Which is true? Both are of course so how do you decide which is MORE important?

Ziff72

October 19th, 2010 at 8:55 PM ^

Give it to Vegas.   Just extrapolate the lines of each game into a computer model and it's done.

Alternate theory is if you want to be part of the poll you have to put up your own money and bet on the games based on your rankings.   Then we'll see who you really think the best team is.

bighouseinmate

October 19th, 2010 at 11:42 PM ^

I believe it is mostly due to people not moving the teams back for losses or for poor play like they should be. When a team does little, even in a win, to a poor team, they should be knocked for it. Instead, we have many moving up in the polls. This is partly due to lack of people actually viewing the game(s), and partly due to people giving too much credit to certain leagues and not enough to others. The SEC this year, other than LSU, hasn't really played defense that well, yet they are still considered the top conference.

All in all, I think the voters, especially the coaches, are too ignorant of other football that is played beyond their own spheres of viewing. An SEC coach is not going to be looking at Oregon games, unless they play them, which they don't. The same can be said of B10 coaches and Boise St. The polls suck, and they will forever, or until, and this is unlikely, they commit to a poll of viewers who watch tons of games over the weekend. For the money that the BCS is bringing in, I think they could afford to pay people specifically to watch numerous games over the weekend(not just the highlights) and poll them.

mikoyan

October 20th, 2010 at 9:39 AM ^

I think they should just have a mat on the ground with the logos of all the Division IA schools.  They then release a chicken and where he dumps first is the #1 team and second is #2 and so on.  Sometimes this seems better than what we have.