fROM SPORTINGNEWS.COM<TABLE class=leftHdrText cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 border=0><TBODY><TR vAlign=top><TD>DeCourcy's SportingBlog <!-- – (PHP?)1224 bookmarks --></TD><TD align=right><!--
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Monday, September 12, 2005, 4:38 p.m. ET
If you really want to torture yourself today, there's no need to run a marathon or put 300 pounds on the squat rack. All you need to do is take a look at the weekly college football polls and realize that this great game actually decides its annual championship by a vote.
There apparently are some great football minds on these panels.
They know a cover-2 from a Cover Girl.
They know so much about the game that even if you give them a score -- say, Iowa State 23, Iowa 3 -- they can tell you definitively whether those numbers mean anything. Yep. These folks know more football than football itself.
The Cyclones played about three hours to prove themselves better than the Hawkeyes. The scoreboard said they were as they left the field. The "Bottom Line" crawl on ESPN2 confirmed it maybe 80 times before morning. The newspapers all had Iowa State winning, as well. But the poll voters weren't fooled.
The journalists in the AP poll have Iowa at No. 22 and Iowa State at No. 24 this week. The coaches who vote for USA Today's poll -- still a part of the Bowl Championship Series selection process, by the way -- have Iowa at No. 21 and Iowa State at ... wait, where? Nowhere, really. Seven spots into the "others receiving votes" category, if you want to be official. There's no justification for this lack of logic. The result of the game says Iowa State is better than Iowa. It can't be any simpler than that. If they're going to have these stupid polls, the voters should be deciding whether the Cyclones also are better than Clemson, Fresno State or Boston College. But not Iowa. The folks running the BCS place far too much emphasis on such ridiculous polls in determining which teams play for their championship. They revamped their selection formula a couple years back because it disagreed with the polls. If anything, that fact should have convinced them they were doing things right.
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--></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><TABLE class=module cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=10><TBODY><TR><TD class=v12>Votes trump scores?
Monday, September 12, 2005, 4:38 p.m. ET
If you really want to torture yourself today, there's no need to run a marathon or put 300 pounds on the squat rack. All you need to do is take a look at the weekly college football polls and realize that this great game actually decides its annual championship by a vote.
There apparently are some great football minds on these panels.
They know a cover-2 from a Cover Girl.
They know so much about the game that even if you give them a score -- say, Iowa State 23, Iowa 3 -- they can tell you definitively whether those numbers mean anything. Yep. These folks know more football than football itself.
The Cyclones played about three hours to prove themselves better than the Hawkeyes. The scoreboard said they were as they left the field. The "Bottom Line" crawl on ESPN2 confirmed it maybe 80 times before morning. The newspapers all had Iowa State winning, as well. But the poll voters weren't fooled.
The journalists in the AP poll have Iowa at No. 22 and Iowa State at No. 24 this week. The coaches who vote for USA Today's poll -- still a part of the Bowl Championship Series selection process, by the way -- have Iowa at No. 21 and Iowa State at ... wait, where? Nowhere, really. Seven spots into the "others receiving votes" category, if you want to be official. There's no justification for this lack of logic. The result of the game says Iowa State is better than Iowa. It can't be any simpler than that. If they're going to have these stupid polls, the voters should be deciding whether the Cyclones also are better than Clemson, Fresno State or Boston College. But not Iowa. The folks running the BCS place far too much emphasis on such ridiculous polls in determining which teams play for their championship. They revamped their selection formula a couple years back because it disagreed with the polls. If anything, that fact should have convinced them they were doing things right.
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