Coaches to be held accountable.. kinda..

locoguano · May 27, 2005

http://www.collegefootballnews.com/2005/Columnists/MZ/CoachesPollaccountability.htm

Coaches' Poll Accountability
At least the end of the year poll will have some validity ... maybe
ByMatthew Zemek

It was announced yesterday that the American Football Coaches Association will have its members--specifically, the ranks of Division I-A college football coaches--make their final regular season poll votes a matter of public record this season.

Hours after the ACC Championship Game concludes on the first Saturday of December, the coaches will have to put their names next to a vote that will help determine the BCS title game matchup, held at the Rose Bowl at the end of the 2005 campaign.

Does this mean coaches will finally start watching college football games?

This is a welcome development to be sure, but in the first 24 hours after the announcement from AFCA Executive Director Grant Teaff, it is imperative to ensure that this action has some teeth. More to the point, it’s essential that this embrace of much-needed transparency in the championship selection process is not valued simply for transparency itself. This laudable display of openness by the nation’s coaches will truly mean something only if the brethren can then offer legitimate and reasonably researched explanations for their selections.

Let’s not kid ourselves here--coaches still won’t have much time in which to watch other games. Coaching is and has become a very exhausting, exhaustive, round-the-clock job in this modern age.

But if the nation’s coaches care about the sport enough to make their poll votes public--and this act certainly suggests as much--they need to then publicize something even more important: the thought process that goes behind their votes.

As Spanky and Our Gang said, “Sunday will never be the same.” Indeed: the biggest Sunday football drama this fall won’t be the NFL regular season, but the spectacle of college coaches, on the down day after their teams’ Saturday battles, catching up on action across the rest of the country. Pete Carroll will now need to spend Sunday afternoons watching Texas, Louisville, Florida State, and all the rest of them.

It won’t be enough for coaches to merely make a vote and defend it in a purely political. If Ohio State is in the BCS mix and all Big Ten coaches vote for the Buckeyes--you can apply the same dynamic to Pac-10 coaches for USC, or to SEC coaches for Tennessee--this supposed transparency will merely reveal the AFCA to be a transparent fraud on this subject.

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The only way this positive first step will find fulfillment and true success is if America’s big-time college football coaches inform the nation--via the media--of their opinions over the course of the season. These opinions must be constantly voiced, week to week, with the nuanced detail and depth of insight that reflect the substantial storehouse of football wisdom these head coaches have accumulated in their careers in and around the sport. Merely voicing stock generalizations, or playing possum with the media until unleashing a bombshell vote on December 3, will not help the college football community. The only way this public vote will have a healing effect on fans’ emotions while dramatically increasing the fairness and integrity of a deeply flawed championship game selection process is for coaches to be open, thoughtful, respectful of football fans’ intelligence, and analytically thorough, from week one through the ACC Championship Game.

If there’s one thing college football fans absolutely deserve--and which many already want in the worst way--it is for the BCS title game to be selected on the basis of thorough and extensive observation by the writers, coaches, or anyone else who will have a say in the process. Disagreement won’t go away--that’s part of the sport’s nature, let alone its culture--but as long as every voter has watched every snap of every relevant game, and offers a legitimately detailed, no-BS analysis of the competing teams involved in the BCS derby, no one can charge unfairness anymore.

Coaches, you’ve taken a big first step, and for that, you should all be applauded. But when you watch game tapes on Sunday, those tapes need to include several other teams in addition to your own. And then your Tuesday press conferences must offer non-evasive and appreciably substantive explanations as to why you’d rank certain teams over others at a given point in the season. Without this kind of progressive, continuous openness and manifest intelligence, the AFCA’s move won’t amount to anything, and there will only be even more anger about coaches’ polls than before.

Sundays will never be the same in college football, especially for its member coaches.

Or at least, they better not be. We in the media will be watching to see if coaches have been doing their own bit of watching. The bank of monitors Chris, Lee and Kirk view on Saturdays must then be seen by the likes of Pete (Carroll), Mack (Brown) and Jim (Tressel) on Sundays.

Happy viewing, coaches. We hope.
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Proud Tiger · May 27, 2005

Another positive step IMHO.

mcmikel · May 27, 2005

Mini-steps. Woo-Hoo for posting THE last poll, but how 'bout the ones mid-season in the season that might have a one-loss Notre Dame #10 and undefeated SEC team # 15? I'd kill to see a Shula's or Tuberville's picks if it effect their team adversley by a truthfully ranking of Auburn or Alabama.

I'm glad to see the AP out of the loop. I'm a college football fan with minimal interest in the NFL. I do not see how a sports writer with a deadline to meet, a smart a.. comment to make, and pro ball to follow can fully appreciate a college football weekend.

MarineTiger · May 27, 2005

This step doesn't solve the problem we want to be solved.

We wanted to make sure coaches didn't screw Texas over Cal again (example of course) but all this does is show what everyone did at the end

MarcusQuinn · May 27, 2005

This is actually not a good thing. The coaches do not have time to watch and evaluate every game that effects the top 25-35 teams. So what do you think they will do? They will look at the AP poll, watch Lee, Kirk, Trev and the boys and then base their votes to reflect what they feel is the general, "safe" rankings according to the media. AP gets out of the BCS, yet still gets to influence rankings without any accountability. And the coaches are the ones that have political, financial and competitive reasons to worry about. The media just hit a home run.

cadillacattack · May 27, 2005

This is actually not a good thing. The coaches do not have time to watch and evaluate every game that effects the top 25-35 teams. So what do you think they will do? They will look at the AP poll, watch Lee, Kirk, Trev and the boys and then base their votes to reflect what they feel is the general, "safe" rankings according to the media. AP gets out of the BCS, yet still gets to influence rankings without any accountability. And the coaches are the ones that have political, financial and competitive reasons to worry about. The media just hit a home run.
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You're dead-on the money, MQ. The media influence now becomes greater under this scenario. What does that mean? It means that teams in major media market have a decided bias (all other things being equal) over small market teams.

This type of result is what you get when you treat symptoms instead of problems.

Proud Tiger · May 28, 2005

MarcusQuinn said:

This is actually not a good thing. The coaches do not have time to watch and evaluate every game that effects the top 25-35 teams. So what do you think they will do? They will look at the AP poll, watch Lee, Kirk, Trev and the boys and then base their votes to reflect what they feel is the general, "safe" rankings according to the media. AP gets out of the BCS, yet still gets to influence rankings without any accountability. And the coaches are the ones that have political, financial and competitive reasons to worry about. The media just hit a home run.
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So why should the coaches even be voting in a poll?

mcmikel · May 29, 2005

Proud Tiger said:

So why should the coaches even be voting in a poll?
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I'd rather the coaches than a bunch of Stanford educated sportswriters with agendas!

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Coaches to be held accountable.. kinda..

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cadillacattack Illegitimi non carborundum est

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