Do pollsters really think for themselves?

[Tigeman]

I've always wondered about the polls if pollsters think for themselves or just follow the "unwritten rules"?

I've seen a bunch of times where undefeated #1 and #2 play each other. #1 BARELY beats #2 Like their supposed to do and #2 falls 3 or 4 spots down, all behind teams w/ 1 loss as well. Why punish #2 so much in that situation? They were supposed to lose, and if they lose by only a field goal, that means they were pretty damn close to #1 and probably were the #2 team.

Then you have this week.... South Carolina totally manhandled Bama. We all watched that game, and there's no doubt SC was the better team. Now SC lost an undefeated top 10 Auburn team. So in theory Auburn should be ranked highest of the 3, then SC, THEN Bama. I mean common sense, right? Even if you don't think Auburn is better than Bama, SC obviously is, so you can't rank Bama higher than SC. I mean this was the whole deal w/ us and * for the year until we throttled Tech....so same theory applies...shouldn't it? Maybe I'm employing to much common sense here. Discuss :pop:

[Scott D]

Depends on what you consider to be thinking for themselves. One AP pollster didn't submit his first ballot for the AP poll until after the games of 10/2. And before pollspeak.com went down/unpaid whatever you want to call it, there actually can be a varying degree of how the AP voters vote in regards to their ballots.

Coaches poll I still say the jury is out, because I'd say at least 75% of those are filled out by someone in the athletic department that is not the head coach whose name is attached to the vote.

[TooSoon]

I've always wondered about the polls if pollsters think for themselves or just follow the "unwritten rules"?

I've seen a bunch of times where undefeated #1 and #2 play each other. #1 BARELY beats #2 Like their supposed to do and #2 falls 3 or 4 spots down, all behind teams w/ 1 loss as well. Why punish #2 so much in that situation? They were supposed to lose, and if they lose by only a field goal, that means they were pretty damn close to #1 and probably were the #2 team.




I agree with you, but it rarely works out that way.

[Tigeman]

Coaches poll I still say the jury is out, because I'd say at least 75% of those are filled out by someone in the athletic department that is not the head coach whose name is attached to the vote.

I actually give the coaches poll a pass as well....those guys don't exactly get to watch the games.

[PDXsooner]

Then you have this week.... South Carolina totally manhandled Bama. We all watched that game, and there's no doubt Bama was the better team.

How on earth do you figure this? Without all the hype and lip-service from ESPN and so forth, would you really deduce that Alabama was better than South Carolina after watching that game? I thought the exact opposite.

[Tigeman]

I'm sorry, that was a typo. I meant to say SC was the clearly the better team! I think the rest of the post got that point across. Let me go back and edit it.

[KantoSooner]

There are going to be biases to all of them due to:
1) No one can watch all the games. You probably can't even watch all the teams more than once in a season even if you're a zealot. Even if you endlessly channel surf, you are not going to see or understand the flow of the game(s) you're checking out.
2) If you're that into football, you probably have teams you like and teams you don't. You're going to carry those attitudes with you.
3) There's not a lot of time to make the decisions. Pollsters are going to rush.
4) The old argument of 'this week' vs. 'body of work' are the pollsters even ranking the same thing as each other?

among others. Plus there are intangibles like weather, officiating, etc. It's a moving target. I love the polls as much as the next person, but try to take them with a large grain of salt. My primary b*tch is that such an obviously flawed product is treated so seriously as to impact bowls and careers. That said, you have to rank or seed somehow. Polls are one more reason in favor of a playoff; at least there the role of the poll would be muted.

[Scott D]

Don't forget ole Pete DiPrimio in Indy...the guy that keeps voting Boise #1 because they beat OU in the Fiesta Bowl a few years back or so I heard.

[AZSOONER]

you shouldnt be able to rank a team higher than another if it's been settled on the field, unless team 1 beat 2 and 2 beat 3 and 3 beat 1. i'm waiting for the loser of the national title game to be crowned the champ. with this ****ty system it just might happen.

[Leroy Lizard]

I have bigger issues when pollsters place a higher ranked team as an underdog. If you really thought Team A (Oklahoma) was ranked lower than Team B (Boise St), why were you favoring Oklahoma over Boise St. in the game?

[KantoSooner]

Those pesky little bias thingies: hard for any serious football person to favor Boise over OU, even if the rankings say otherwise.

[agoo758]

That's the beauty of the computer system, and that is why the computers should have almost all the influence with the polls serving as nothing more than a tiebreaker.

[PDXsooner]

I'm sorry, that was a typo. I meant to say SC was the clearly the better team! I think the rest of the post got that point across. Let me go back and edit it.

much better!:)

[LRoss]

Nobody cares, but here are my thoughts on all of this.

Polls are what they are. People's subjective opinions, and since people's subjective opinions naturally vary (being what they are, subjective opinions), they collect a whole bunch of 'em so that in theory they give some semblence of reality when they're compiled together.

I always cringe when a ballot is criticized because the voter should be entitled to their own subjective opinion -- if one can be "right" and another "wrong" then it's not a poll any more, and it becomes more scientific -- like maybe if you worked up some criteria and applied that criteria systematically and objectively across the board . . . except now what I've just described is the computers! That's right, people criticize the voters for NOT acting like computers! Isn't that WHY they're asked to vote, to give their subjective opinion, which a computer cannot do?

But it gets even better -- when the people and their subjective opinions don't like what the computers and their objetive analysis pump out, then they change the whole system so that the computers are forced to align their objective analysis to the subjetive opinions of the polls -- classic example being the outcry of USC being "left out" in favor of OU and LSU a few years back -- the humans didn't like the computers and so they changed the formula so that if it happened again, the computers -- which are there to provide the balance of objective analysis that subjective humans cannot do -- get criticized for not agreeing with the subjective opinion, in other words the computers are criticized for not being human.

That's right! The humans aren't enough like computers and the computers aren't enough like the humans. If ONLY I was making this up!

[agoo758]

\

The humans aren't enough like computers and the computers aren't enough like the humans. If ONLY I was making this up!

I'll make it simple, computers should be computers and humans should have very little weight in the rankings, it's the only way to keep ESPN from crowning the champion every year.

[Harris County Sooner]

I have bigger issues when pollsters place a higher ranked team as an underdog. If you really thought Team A (Oklahoma) was ranked lower than Team B (Boise St), why were you favoring Oklahoma over Boise St. in the game?
It's not the pollsters that do that, it's the gamblers.

[cccasooner2]

IMHO, polls are currently meaningless except in the final selection for the BCS championship game. Hopefully, someday there will be a playoff system in place to make polls obsolete. Of course we then all pine for the good old days when we could continuosly b**l s**t each other of a teams rank throughout the season. It's really laughable how the "experts" rank teams beginning in pre-season and then continuosly admit how wrong they were each successive week until finally after 13 or so weeks they finally "get it right" in a "penultimate" poll. Two comatants are chosen from the "penultimate" human poll plus a final poll of "authorized" computers. Yep, the champion is then determined in the CCG. It should end there, but the AP then performs a final poll and anoints a different champ if it does not agree with the BCS. Never the less, a final AP poll will tell us how all teams should have been ranked from the beginning if only we could have known about all the random events that just happened to get in the way.

[OUinFLA]

I have bigger issues when pollsters place a higher ranked team as an underdog. If you really thought Team A (Oklahoma) was ranked lower than Team B (Boise St), why were you favoring Oklahoma over Boise St. in the game?

because the Vegas oddsmakers don't really care what the polls say???

[cccasooner2]

because the Vegas oddsmakers don't really care what the polls say???

Right, they just follow the money and adjust to ensure their bookmaking is profitable "in totality".

[bluedogok]

Do pollsters really think for themselves?No

[mehip]

This happened to the Devils when I was at school in Tempe, we spanked the crap out of Nebbish and yet two weeks later they were ranked ahead of us.

[Ton Loc]

I'd like to see the Vegas oddsmakers release a top 25 poll after the non-conf schedule. Not to let it count for anything, but just because they're right more often than any poll has ever been.