College Bowl – Selection Committee?
Why does college football stick with absurd notions?
The Top 25 voting polls are overrated and prejudiced. How can we expect an impartial vote when the people making the votes, the coaches, are too busy doing their job coaching their teams to be watching everyone else as well. These coaches probably just have an assistant coach or grad assistant or their neighbor’s pet dog Wondermutt make the vote for them.
I can’t blame the coaches for being too busy, but I can blame them for not giving up the vote if you don’t have the time to cast it seriously. I say seriously because a BCS bowl bid is worth tens of millions of dollars, from recruiting to boosters to TV exposure to cash for the game itself, these votes are pivotal and to waste them by giving away slots in the top 25 willy-nilly is just ludicrous and almost criminal.
If the beat writer for the Charlotte Observer wakes up Sunday morning and sees that Hawaii beat San Jose State 35-31, how is he supposed to cast his vote? Will he or she actually look up the box score and see that the #23 ranked Rainbow Warriors led 31-3 into the fourth before the third and fourth string defense gave up mop-up touchdowns? Or will they see it was a see-saw battle with clutch plays and impressive last minute drives? No, probably not. The voter says “Hmm, they were ranked 23 and they won and the team ahead of them lost so I guess I’ll make them 21 or 22 this time” and that is the limit of the thought process.
How do we fix this problem? The same way the NCAA handles the basketball tournament: nominate a selection committee. Whom would you have more faith in? A group of 75 writers guaranteed to see no more than 3 or 4 games, or a panel of a dozen writers or fans or college football maniacs devoted to watching every single game involving a team in the top 40, starting at 10 AM Saturday and ending late Saturday night?
For basketball the selection committee considers many factors: strength of schedule, quality wins, road wins, strength of conference, et al. After picking 64 teams for the hoops tourney, the occasional gripe comes in for whomever finishes 65th or 66th but for the most part the panel gets it right. Why can’t we do this for football as well?
If Kansas State wants to get fat on the easy-schedule hog playing games against Morgan State, Stanley State, Morgan and Stanley State, et al. then their schedule strength, ranking dead last out nearly 120 teams, should be held against them. Unfortunately, we can’t count on the voters to do this because, well, I’m not blind and I can read the previous year’s polls. Voters traditionally vote for an unbeaten team regardless of opponent. We can fix this failing of the voters by using a selection committee instead.
A committee can watch every game, represent every conference and team fairly, consider factors too difficult for coaches or writers to use – in summary, a selection committee would be a vast improvement over the current system.
Now if we can just get all the writers and coaches to relinquish their votes. That’s not such an absurd notion, is it?
