College football doesn’t have a fair, objective way to determine a champion. All we have are polls of which team people think it is.
One such poll is the AP Top 25 Poll, a compilation of top 25 ballots of 59 “expert” sportswriters from around the country. Unfortunately, it seems these writers put little thought into their ballots, only looking at the raw numbers of wins and losses. All too often, they seem to forget about head-to-head results, or that all schedules are not equal.
A great example is Ohio State, ranked at No. 5 in the final AP poll, and Wisconsin, ranked seventh. Did the Wisconsin 31, Ohio State 18 final score lapse into meaninglessness?
Yes, Ohio State did finish at 12-1 to Wisconsin’s 11-2, but remember that the schedules were not identical. Ohio State did not have to play the 11-2 Michigan State team, which beat Wisconsin, and Wisconsin’s bowl opponent (TCU) was much tougher than Ohio State’s (Arkansas). Logically, Wisconsin deserves the higher ranking, but only nine of the voters saw it that way.
Similarly, Boise State sits at ninth in the final poll, two spots ahead of Nevada. Did the writers just forget about Nevada’s 34-31 victory over the Broncos? I acknowledge that Boise State generally beat common opponents by a larger margin, including a manhandling of the Hawaii team who beat Nevada. I acknowledge that Boise State’s non-conference resume is a little stronger.
But that doesn’t matter. These are two teams that have similar resumes, so the head-to-head result should win out. Only 20 of the voters agree, though.
Further down the rankings, I see Central Florida ranked at No. 21, four spots above North Carolina State. While NC State’s loss to East Carolina is inexcusable, the Wolfpack did beat UCF 28-21 and posted a similar record (9-4 to 11-3) on a much tougher ACC schedule.
Of course, this raises another question of why Central Florida is even ranked. Sure, 11-3 is a good record, but those three losses (NC State, Kansas State, Southern Miss) were the only three teams with winning records the Knights played all season. Not exactly murderer’s row.
Yes, I was pretty surprised when UCF beat Georgia, but if a 6-7 SEC team who also lost to Colorado is the only win you have to hang your hat on, you probably don’t deserve to be in the top 25. At least fellow CUSA team and No. 24 Tulsa beat Notre Dame and Hawaii. Those aren’t earth-shattering wins, but at least they’re decent opponents to have beaten, so I won’t complain too hard about the Golden Hurricane’s presence in the top 25.
Even more irritatingly, voters late in the season began including Northern Illinois on their ballots, despite losses to Iowa State and Illinois (whom no one was considering ranking) and no notable wins.
Then, unsurprisingly, since NIU wasn’t actually one of the country’s 25 best teams, the Huskies were upset by Miami-Ohio in the MAC Championship game. But that didn’t stop voters from including the Huskies on their ballots — they just started putting Miami-Ohio on their ballots too.
Thankfully, neither made it into the final top 25, but they both received votes. And sure enough, none of the six silly voters who included Miami-Ohio on their ballots included Florida, a clearly superior team who beat Miami-Ohio 34-12.
I think what bugs me the most is that there’s just no accountability. Writers aren’t punished for illogical ballots. Nothing happened when Desmond Conner of The Hartford Currant, a Connecticut newspaper, ranked Connecticut in his ballot. This is a team that went 8-5 and lost to non-bowl teams like Temple, Louisville and Rutgers.
The crazy thing is that the AP poll doesn’t really even matter. It doesn’t factor into the BCS, which determines which two teams get to play for the national title and which other teams get denied a rightful shot.
One element of the BCS, the USA Today Coaches’ Poll, allows 57 FBS head coaches to make the ballots. Sounds like it should be even more accurate, right? Wrong. The Ohio State/Wisconsin, Boise State/Nevada, and UCF/NC State mismatches are all still there in the final poll, and those teams are even further apart. Northern Illinois and Miami-Ohio received votes.
What’s worse is that coaches can vote for their own teams. Utah head coach Kyle Whittingham voted Utah No. 1 in the final 2008 poll. While he certainly had a legitimate beef with the system (the Utes were the only undefeated team and just had manhandled a then-12-1 Alabama team), but it shouldn’t be up to a team’s own head coach to declare it a champion.
The other components of the BCS are the Harris Poll (a collection of so-called “experts” that’s even worse than the AP poll) and six computer polls. As a math nerd, I wish I could like the computer polls. But I can’t — they’re nonsense. They aren’t allowed to use margin of victory or homefield advantage. One of the computer pollsters, Richard Billingsley, even admits he has no background in mathematics or statistics.
And what’s worse is the propensity for errors. Nobody in the country really cared, but the BCS actually had an error in its final standings this past season thanks to a computer error. The Colley Matrix had forgotten to include the result of a game between Western Illinois and Appalachian State, and once that was fixed, Boise State moved ahead of LSU to No. 10.
Somehow, even though the Colley Matrix would have been only 8.33 percent of each team’s total BCS ranking, an FCS result between teams neither Boise State nor LSU played switches those two team’s rankings.
Something is really wrong with that. What if Boise State had been undefeated and something like that determined whether or not the Broncos got to play for a title?
Unlike the other five, the Colley Matrix makes its formula available to the public. Unlike the other five, the Colley Matrix has accountability. Who knows how many times the other polls have made mistakes and nobody knew?
Think back to the BCS controversies in, well, pretty much every season. Are you convinced an error like this has never happened before? That it won’t happen again?
Unfortunately, we don’t have a playoff to determine objectively who’s No. 1, so we have to rely on polls. These polls, consisting of secret, shady, mathematically invalid computer formulas, coaches with an agenda and lazy, illogical human “expert” voters, control the national perception of who the best teams are. And to me, that ruins college football.