Sports Poll Insanity

(Boring Sports Stuff-Bear With Me Here)

I generally ignore professional sports, but I follow college sports with a good deal of interest. The happenings on the gridiron on a Saturday afternoon in October or on the basketball court on Tuesday night in the middle of January doesn’t control my mood and dictate the level of self esteem that I enjoy in my life, however.

This isn’t true for some people that I know. My dad had a friend, Jim, that was a HUGE Auburn Football fan and Jim would become physically sick if Shug Jordan’s Auburn Tiger’s lost to Bear Bryant’s Alabama Crimson Tide in November in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.

What really amazes and confuses me is the concept of sports rankings.

You know--the so called “Top Twenty (Five.)”

There’s the coach’s poll and the sports writers poll. They keep changing the name(s) of the polls through the years, but it is still essentially the coach’s poll and the sports writer’s poll no matter what you call them. Then in football, there is the Frankenstein of sports polls, the BCS. I’ll save that discussion for another day, perhaps.

I put very little stock in any of these farcical listings, since the coaches are in theory too busy to pay attention to anyone but whomever they are playing tomorrow or next week, and the sports writers are an even more biased, mindless, partisan bunch of ingrates than the “regular” writers in the “mainstream media.”

I did a little research and found out that, in order to be one of the coaches that votes in the “coach’s poll” and maintain the appearance of being “fair and balanced,” you generally can’t actually coach a team that has a basketball program—at least a successful basketball program.

Here is the listing:

"The USA TODAY/ESPN Board of Coaches is made up of 31 Division I head coaches. All are members of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. The 2004-05 board: Dana Altman, Creighton; Tevester Anderson, Jackson State; Eddie Biedenbach, North Carolina-Asheville; Jim Boeheim, Syracuse; Charles Coles, Miami (Ohio); Barry Collier, Nebraska; Dick Davey; Santa Clara; Fran Dunphy, Pennsylvania; Mick Durham, Montana State; Rob Evans, Arizona State; Steve Fisher, San Diego State; Pat Flannery, Bucknell; Greg Graham, Boise State; Tom Green, Fairleigh Dickinson; David Henderson, Delaware; Bob Huggins, Cincinnati; Johnny Jones, North Texas; Gene Keady, Purdue; Eddie McCarter, Texas-Arlington; Bob McKillop, Davidson; Phil Martelli, Saint Joseph's; Joe Mihalich, Niagara; Ron "Fang" Mitchell, Coppin State; Dave Odom, South Carolina; Rick Samuels, Eastern Illinois; Kirk Speraw, Central Florida; Bob Thomason, Pacific; Perry Watson, Detroit Mercy; Gary Williams, Maryland; Dennis Wolff, Boston University; Rich Zvosec, Missouri-Kansas City."

No Dean Smith’s or Frank McGuire’s on this listing, but they must be psychic or psyco or something to conjure up the seasonal ranking and how they do it is a mystery to me.

Suppose, in basketball, the eighth ranked team plays the second ranked team, and the number two team wins. You might say “Hurray for the pollsters, they were right,” right? Well, not so fast there Kemosabe.

While the next poll will still probably show the number two team as number two, the former number eight team will probably fall in the rankings to number twelve or thirteen (unless the looser is UCLA, Michigan, Duke, North Carolina or one of a few other perennial national favorites in which case they will only drop a few spots as a result of being out played by the number two team.)

How can the outcome of a single game yield such a result? I mean, if number two beats number eight, the universe is in order, isn’t it. Two is better than eight, eight is better than twenty, Right?

Well, maybe not in the world of sports rankings.

Number twenty beating number eight or number two is an entirely different matter. Yessirreee. If you are number twenty and you beat number two, particularly “early’ in the season, the best you can expect is to rise a half dozen spots to maybe number fourteen or fifteen while number two will drop half that distance to number five or so. They figure that your team just got “lucky” and the pollsters refuse to acknowledge that they might be wrong in ranking the number two team number two.

If number twenty beats number eight, number eight will take a nose dive again to number twelve or thirteen, but the winner (number twenty) will only rise a couple of points to number seventeen or eighteen.

I guess it is like stretching or compressing a spring or something—the further you push or pull it the harder it gets to make progress. All in all, it makes absolutely no sense to me and I really don’t spend much time paying attention to it all or run around “crowing” about my team’s ranking in public.

Another interesting thing to notice when you look at the membership of the College Board of Coach’s is to wonder why the heck most of these guys get to decide the college basketball rankings when they coach at such no name institutions? South Carolina’s Dave Odam made a name for himself at Wake Forrest and Maryland’s Gary Williams took Maryland to a regular season ACC championship in 2002 and won the 2004 ACC tournament, but the balance of the coaches’ schools are relatively invisible in the regular season polls.

Not so with this year’s NCAA Tournament. Tom Green’s Fairleigh Dickenson is seeded number 16 and Fran Dunphy’s Pennsylvania is seeded number 13 in the Chicago Bracket.

In the Albuquerque Bracket, Dave Altman’s Creighton is seeded number 10.

In the Syracuse Bracket, Kirk Speraw’s Central Florida is the number 16 seed.

In the Austin Bracket, Joe Mihalich’s Niagara garnered a 14 seed and Jim Boeheim's Syracuse is a number 4 seed.

There is a general perception that any one basketball conference like the ACC can only be allocated five or at an absolute most--six spots in the NCAA tournament. Some years it’s a battle to get four seeds out of sixty-four.

This year the ACC got two number one seeds and five seeds overall—Duke, GT, NC, NC State, and Wake Forrest.

Here is the funny thing--the Coach’s Board members did even better than the ACC. They made out with six seeds, with Syracuse and Creighten being the only no-brainers. Two sixteen seeds, one fourteen seed, and one thirteen seed seem to be ample rewards for this group of “insiders.”

I wonder how many of these same members of the college “Board of Coaches” are also on the NCAA selection committee?

Just wondering…