Human bias distances Bruins from BCS bowls

Karl “Vince Lombardi” Dorrell says he isn’t
worried about the BCS.

So I’ll do the worrying for the great one about the Bowl
Championship Series.

Specifically, the polls aren’t giving UCLA much
respect.

The two traditional major college football polls (The Associated
Press and Coaches) both have the unbeaten Bruins at No. 7 behind
two teams with one loss in Miami (Fla.) and LSU.

Go figure.

And because of these polls, it will be hard for UCLA to make a
prestigious BCS bowl game or the national championship game, even
if the Bruins’ dream season continues and they pull out huge
comeback wins against Arizona, Arizona State and even USC.

These biased polls need to go. A group of voters who may or may
not watch all the games shouldn’t determine who plays for the
national championship.

UCLA is a classic example of why the polls are messed up. This
late in the season, there is no justification for ranking a
major-conference undefeated team behind a team with a loss, since
by now every major-conference team has played at least a few
quality opponents.

And don’t brush these polls off as meaningless. The
Coaches poll makes up one-third of the BCS formula that determines
which teams go to the illustrious BCS bowl games, and the AP Poll
was one-third of the formula up until this year.

Enter the Harris Interactive College Football Poll, which is new
this year. The Harris Poll replaces the AP Poll, which opted to
remove itself from the formula.

The Harris Poll is made up of ex-players, coaches, college
football writers and athletic administrators ranging from familiar
names (Former NFL great Terry Bradshaw, former UCLA Athletic
Director Peter Dalis) to more obscure ones (Deseret News columnist
Dick Harmon, who had the guts to write a column bashing the BCS,
even though it’s a system he is technically a part of). The
poll was scrutinized heavily at the beginning of the year, and
rightly so.

One week, a winless Idaho team was ranked 20th by one voter.
Another week, the total point values exceeded the theoretical
maximum possible number of points (each vote is given a numerical
point value).

But ironically, it is the most maligned parts of the BCS ““
the Harris Poll and the computer rankings, which make up the other
one-third of the formula ““ keeping UCLA at No. 5 in the BCS
standings. And it’s the Harris Poll that currently has the
best results of any human poll out there.

The Harris Poll has UCLA ahead of Louisiana State, but still
behind Miami. A larger percentage of Harris Poll voters have USC at
No. 1 than the Coaches Poll or the AP. The Harris Poll kept Notre
Dame’s loss to historically dominant USC in perspective and
didn’t move Notre Dame as far down in the polls as the
Coaches poll.

It’s a start.

But human polls shouldn’t determine which teams play for a
national championship.

The players on the field should, because humans are biased.
Harris Poll voters were chosen based on some kind of affiliation
with a school or conference.

And then there’s the Coaches poll.

Even if we were to assume, for a moment, that the coaches
themselves actually took their voting seriously and watched as much
college football as possible, do we honestly believe they
wouldn’t be extremely biased?

Do we honestly believe that they’d vote teams in their own
conferences fairly, and not move them up a spot or two (or three)
when millions of dollars in bowl appearances and national prestige
are involved?

There’s also the matter of being knowledgeable about the
teams in the sport. Coaches in football work harder than coaches in
most sports ““ they are notorious for spending every hour of
the day analyzing games and practice films of their teams and their
opponents. But that’s the problem ““ no coach spends his
time watching all 119 teams, or even all of the teams in the top
25.

Yet the Coaches poll is one-third of the formula used to
determine which teams go the most prestigious bowls in the
country.

What a system the BCS is. What a system.

E-mail Quiñonez at

gquinonez@media.ucla.edu, especially if you want to
interview him for the Dodger, Red Sox or Devil Ray general manager
openings.

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