Week 15 WORST Voter -- Jon Wilner (again), San Jose Mercury News  (posted 12/08/07)

Looking at the Full Analysis Report for week 15, Wilner is an easy target.  Obviously, his week 15 ballot has the most extreme votes (9).  However, that isn't the only reason he is this week's Worst.  He also happens to have received the most votes for Worst Voter of the Week, but that isn't the only reason he was named this week's Worst.  The main reason he was named Worst Voter of the Week is:

1)  Spite.  Not spite against Wilner...the spite he shows Ohio State.  Wilner obviously doesn't want Ohio State to go to the national championship game, and he seems willing to use the power vested in him to help make that possible.  After all, he says in his AP Poll Blog that the Buckeyes have "no business being in the national championship game."  Pollspeak has no problem with that opinion.  We fully respect the other voter's who picked LSU, Oklahoma, Hawaii, Virginia Tech or Georgia #1.  The reason Wilner is being singled out is that he dropped Ohio State all the way to #8.  Just to be clear, this is lower than any computer or any voter in the Coaches' Poll or Harris Interactive Poll.  This is lower than he ranked six 2-loss teams and one 3-loss team.  This is unreasonably low and seems it could only serve the purpose of helping keep the Buckeyes out of the national championship game...as he asserts.  Unbiased voters should not use their ballot as a weapon.

2)  Here is the list of Wilner's votes on the extreme:

• Ohio State -- #8 (lowest)
• Boston College -- #10 (highest)
• Tennessee -- #11 (highest)
• Cincinnati -- #13 (highest)
• Kansas -- #17 (lowest)
• Oregon State -- #19 (highest)
• Hawaii -- #20 (lowest)
• BYU -- #25 (lowest)
• Wisconsin -- unranked (lowest)

3)  Pollspeak actually agrees with much of the reasoning Wilner uses to rank teams in relation to each other.  However, there were a couple of notable exceptions:

• He ranks Auburn (#15) over USF (#21) even though the Bulls have a better record and beat the Tigers in the head-to-head matchup. 
• He ranks Texas Tech (#18) over Texas (#24) again, even though the Longhorns have a better record and beat the Red Raiders in the head-to-head matchup. 

A final note on Wilner's Ohio State ranking.  This isn't the secretive Coaches' Poll, where the voters have a vested interest in improving the rankings of teams they play and lowering the rankings of their nearest competition.  That is almost an expected part of the Coaches Poll, and that topic will covered shortly. However, we really expect more from AP Voters, which is the biggest reason Wilner has earned a fourth stint as Worst Voter of the Week.

There are other items that could be pointed out, but these are the highlights.  We'll let you discuss the rest on our FORUMS.

GOOD Voter of Week 15 -- Doug Lesmerises, Plain Dealer  (posted 12/09/07)

First a disclaimer:  Nobody at Pollspeak has an affiliation with nor particular affinity for The Ohio State University or the state of Ohio for that matter.  That being said, our Good Voter of the Week is the Ohio State beat writer and was chosen partly as a counter-point to Jon Wilner's anti-Buckeye-ism.  After all, we're not picking the "best" voter...just one of the many good ones.  So this week's is Cleveland's own Doug Lesmerises.

There's always more to say about the problems in a ballot than what's right.  It's hard to find fault with anything on Lesmerises' week 15 ballot.  He has no votes on the extreme and only two near the extreme.  So I guess Florida fans and Arizona State fans could cry fowl.  However, looking objectively at his ballot, it's rock solid.

Lesmerises' also did a fine job of enforcing rule (of thumb) #1.  In short, when two teams have the same record, and have played each other, rank the winner ahead:

• Boston College (#14) over Clemson (#15)
• Cincinnati (#17) over USF (#19)
• USF (#19) over Auburn (#21)
• Auburn (#21) over Arkansas (unranked)
• Texas (#20) over Texas Tech (unranked)
• Illinois (#12) over Wisconsin (#24)

You can make cases for Good Voters of the Week on our FORUMS.

The Coaches' Perspective (posted 12/12/07)

1) Howard Schnellenberger -- FAU's only BCS top-25 opponent is USF, but The Bulls aren't one of his extreme votes. Unlike Kansas, who he has highest in the nation at #2. Most of the other coaches voting Kansas nearly that high are in the Big 12. Schnellenberger briefly coached at Oklahoma and can't have fond memories of his infamous stint in the Big 12. Ah, there is a pattern – Schnellenberger ranks every Big-12 team (Kansas - #2, Missouri - #4, Texas - #14) in the highest 10%...except for Oklahoma, which he ranks in the bottom 10% (#7). It seems he doesn’t have an issue with the Big 12…just Oklahoma.

2) Bobby Bowden – voted West Virginia highest. As anybody who has seen "We Are Marshall" knows, Bowden coached West Virginia (1970-1975) before FSU. Also, FSU recently hired offensive line-coach Rick Trickett from West Virginia, and Offensive Coordinator/Head-Coach-in-waiting Jimbo Fisher was born and raised in West Virginia…so there are plenty of ties to West Virginia on the staff.

3) Dennis Franchione – Texas A&M’s ex-coach was 5-0 against Hawaii as the head coach of New Mexico and TCU. It seems a lack of respect may have carried over to this year’s ballot, ranking the Warriors lowest at #22.

He also ranks Clemson lowest in the nation at #21. This is a stretch, but Doba was defensive coordinator at The Citadel (The Military College of South Carolina) in 1987-88. In 1988, The Citadel made it to the I-AA national playoffs, but were shut out earlier that year by Clemson 24 – 0. We seriously doubt he has had an axe to grind with Clemson all these years, but since there is no historical record of ballots for us to check, who knows? Also, who knows what other biases head coaches or assistant coaches harbor that no reasonable amount of research would uncover.

• Half of Oklahoma’s #1 votes came from their head coach, Bob Stoops. Stoops also gave LSU their lowest ranking (#6) behind Big 12 members Missouri (#3) and Kansas (#4). You can’t blame him for trying to reach the national championship game (but you can blame the BCS).
• By contrast, only two of LSU’s 11 first-place votes came from SEC schools. One of those was Les Miles himself. Miles also gave Arkansas and Auburn their highest rankings, Tennessee and Florida their second-highest rankings, and Georgia a respectable #3 ranking (but not so close to affect LSU’s trip to the title game…just in case.)
• While Tyrone Willingham (Washington) was at Notre Dame, he lost to Boston College all three years. Coincidentally he is the only coach to leave the Eagles off of his ballot.
• Michigan was only ranked by six coaches. Five of them were Big Ten coaches and the other was Michigan alum, Les Miles.
• Tommy Bowden, Howard Schnellenberger, Mike Bellotti and Bobby Bowden were the only coaches to vote Missouri ahead of Oklahoma. Talk about breaking rule #1! These teams have the same record, and the Sooners beat the Tigers TWICE this year.
• Art Briles, Houston’s ex-coach – cast the only vote for Houston (#23).
• George O’Leary of UCF gives his own team its highest ranking of #17.
• Virginia Tech’s Frank Beamer gave the Hokies their highest ranking of #2.
• Hawaii’s only #1 vote came from fellow WAC coach, Hal Mumme of New Mexico State.
• Illinois’ highest ranking of #9 came from three Big Ten coaches: Bret Bielema (Wisconsin), Mark Dantonio (Michigan State) and Ron Zook (Illinois).
• Wisconsin’s highest ranking of #13 came from Wisconsin coach Bret Bielema, and seemingly unbiased picks from Texas Tech’s Mike Leach and Southern Mississippi’s Jeff Bower.

Biases exist in all polls, but the Coaches' Poll seems particularly susceptible to bias due to the voters' vested interest in the results and the close relationships within the coaching fraternity.  The goal of this article is not to put coaches in the spotlight.  It is to the put the Coaches' Poll in the spotlight and hope steps are taken to fix the inherent problems with using such a poll in the BCS.

This article may be freely distributed, as long as credit and a link are given to Pollspeak.com 

The Harris Interactive Poll - What You Don’t Know (posted 12/19/07)

We’re going to shy away from the typical Bad/Good Voter premise with the Harris Interactive Poll. Most of our readers have gotten comfortable with Pollstalker by now and can tell for themselves who the most extreme voter is, etc. (Okay, it’s Bobby Aillet). Instead, we’ll point out some of the differences between this poll and the others. We can’t guarantee that you don’t know these things already, but if you do know, please tell us what happened to the missing ballots.

The first, and most obvious, difference is that Harris Interactive is the largest of the polls. With 114 voters, it nearly doubles the Coaches' Poll and dwarfs everything Pollspeak has covered to date:

• AP – 65 voters
• Coaches – 60 voters
• Men’s Basketball – 72 voters
• Women’s Basketball – 50 voters

However, not so obvious, is that all 114 voters don’t have to vote each week. 114 ballots were counted in weeks 15 and 14, but week 13 only had 113 voters. Week 11 only had 112 voters. In all, seven ballots have gone missing during the 11 weeks Harris has been polling this season. The missing votes could be from seven individual voters, or some voters may have neglected to vote multiple times. Since the ballots are secret, we have no idea. We contacted Harris Interactive about this discrepancy. We asked them how many ballots per week are allowed to go missing, and what happens when voters don’t turn in ballots? Unfortunately their only response so far has been: “I would refer you to the December 2 documents that are on the Harris Interactive website (http://www.harrisinteractive.com/news/bcspoll.asp); these document indicate that all 114 Harris Poll voters submitted their rankings on Sunday, Dec 2nd.” The Harris Interactive Poll is the only poll that has allowed missing ballots so far. Neither the AP nor Coaches’ Poll had a different number of voters on any given week.

Another difference with the Harris Interactive poll is that it is made up of a lot of retired people. There are some current media members, but for the most part the poll is made up of former players, former coaches, former media and former college administrators. With all of these retirees, it makes sense that the Harris Interactive Poll might have the oldest voters of any poll. Previously we had assumed that the Coaches’ Poll might have the oldest voters. So we did some research.

We were able to easily look up the ages of 40 of the 114 voters in the Harris Poll.  We would like more data, but this is still a good representative sample. The average age of those 40 voters is 63 years old. The Coaches average age (with 58 of 60 voters checked) was 53 years old. As for the AP, we couldn’t find enough for a representative sample, but suffice to say, they are likely the youngest group.  Some seem to have just graduated from college, and since the AP Poll is only made up of current media, it makes sense that they would be younger than the retirees. So the average age of Harris voters is a full 10 years older than that of the coaches, and likely much older on average than the AP voters.

Does age really matter? It shouldn’t. We are not saying that there should be any type of age limitations placed on voters. Nor are we saying that any one age group votes BETTER than any other age group. However, it is worth noting demographic differences between the polls. If different polls seem to display certain trends, age could be one factor. Perhaps an older generation voter might give more respect to traditional powerhouses than someone from a younger generation. Not that these are definitive examples, but USC was ranked highest (#5) in Harris and #6 in the other two polls. Also, Navy’s only two votes came from the Harris Poll. Again, by no means is this proof of any bias by age, but this is a trend well worth noting and tracking over the years.

While on the topic of age, here is a quick call back to the Coaches’ Poll. It might just be coincidence, but the two oldest voters in the Coaches Poll (Howard Schnellenberger -– 73 and Bobby Bowden -- 78) also happen to be the two most extreme voters according to Pollstalker.

For what it’s worth, the oldest voter we uncovered in the Harris Interactive Poll was Bill Arnsparger, who is 81 and served various coaching stints with Ohio State, Kentucky, Tulane, LSU and the NFL. However, there is a good chance that the Harris Interactive Poll's most extreme voter, Bobby Aillet, is actually older. Unfortunately, our research could not confirm his birth date, but he was captain of the Louisiana Tech football team in 1945, which would likely make him 80 years or older.