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Friday August 18th, 2006
12:01amBlogPoll Round Table V2.1
This past Wednesday morning my votes were due for the Pre-Season BlogPoll Ballot, which I took part in last season. I'll be completely honest and say that I simply didn't have time to fully research like I should have and I just filled it out without any hardcore reasoning.....just by how I felt in my gut. You can see the overall poll results here and my personal poll here.
I don't feel particularly comfortable with anything on there. I basically feel that my Top 10 teams are top 10 worthy going into the season but not necessarily in the order I have'em. The next grouping is between 11 and 18....they're interchangeable. Everyone else is in there because I had to fill out the remainder of the slots.
I wanted to welcome Tom of Off-Tackle not only to the BlogPoll but to the small community of Texas A&M sports blogs. To be completely honest, the only other A&M sports "blog" I'm aware of is AggieBaseball.net. I'd love to know of any others out there that I may not be aware of so drop'em in the "Comments" section. Anyways, welcome Tom!
In addition to the poll coming out we have our first Round Table discussion of the year.....so here we go.....
BlogPoll Roundtable V2.1Q1. What's the biggest rip-off in this preseason poll? Either pick a team that's offensively over or underrated, or you can rag on a particular voter's bad pick (hey, we're all adults here, we can handle it).
A1. Like I said, I wasn't particularly comfortable putting a top 10 together so I can't really come down with the hammer. I guess I'm going to have to go with texas at #2 and it doesn't even have anything to do with them being the bane of my existence.
Losing Vince Young will be too much for them to overcome. They'll be a very good team but they won't be that good. They never went to a BCS game before Vince and wouldn't have been in either of those without him.
Q2. What shold a preseason poll measure? Specifically, should it be a predictor of end-of-season standing (meaning that a team's schedule should be taken into account when determining a ranking), or should it merely be a barometer of talent/hype/expectations?
A2. I'm part of the group that looks at preseason polls as a prediction of where a team will end up. Sure it's fun to put sexy teams at the top but if you don't think they will truly finish as an undefeated or 1-loss team why would you waste your time.
Q3. What is your biggest stretch in your preseason ballot? That is to say, which team has the best chance of making you look like an idiot for overrating them?
A3. I feel fairly safe saying that at least one of my top 10 teams won't finish in there the trouble is picking which one it is. I should go with texas for the reasons I listed above. It could very well be OU though. I know they just lost their starting QB but I just can't imagine Adrian Peterson not making up for it. Yeah, I'm going with OU.
Q4. What do you see as the biggest flaw in the polling system (both wire service and blogpolling)? Is polling an integral part of the great game of college football, or is it an outdated system that needs to be replaced? If you say the latter, enlighten us with your new plan.
A4. The biggest flaws are that big name, traditional powerhouses get too much credit, powder puff schedules aren't held against teams enough (see texas tech the last couple of years), and the preseason polls have too much weight on the final poll. I think polling is solely a way to stir up the cooler talk.....if it wasn't they wouldn't start the polls until mid-November. Let's say you've got 3 undefeated teams on Thanksgiving weekend. They started the season ranked #1, #3, & #15. The team that started #15 has ZERO chance to play for the national championship because the other two teams won't ever drop because they never lost.
I suppose that is exactly what happened to Auburn a couple of years ago.
I'd like the BCS rankings to include SoS. I think it would help give us a better feel for who truly deserves to be playing for the NC.
Q5. You're Scott Bakula, and you have the opportunity to "Quantum Leap" back in time and change any single moment in your team's history. It can be a play on the field, a hiring decision, or your school's founders deciding to build the campus in Northern Indiana, of all godforsaken places. What do you do?
A5. Is it bad that I had to Google Scott Bakula to figure out who he is? I guess I could have utilized what my 3rd grade teacher called "context clues".
Lots of Ags would take this opportunity to take a shot at Fran, but I'm not going to do that. Instead I'm going to say that I wish we had upgraded our facilities earlier. We lost a lot of ground to texas and OU in this aspect of recruiting in the late 90s and it has been haunting us since I stepped on campus.
Hanging onto Coach Bryant wouldn't have been a bad thing either ;)