Starting next year, you may know which college football coaches are voting in the USA Today Top 25 coaches’ poll, but you may not know how they vote at the end of the year.
The final regular-season ballots in the USA Today Top 25 coaches’ poll will no longer be made public beginning with the 2010 season, the American Football Coaches Association announced Wednesday.
The return to a confidential voting process — for the first time since before the 2005 season — was among several changes for the USA Today poll.
The AFCA, which administers the coaches’ poll, opted to make the changes on the recommendation of a three-month independent study by Gallup World Poll of the voter selection process and voting procedures. The coaches’ poll is one of three components used to decide who plays in the Bowl Championship Series title game.
“It’s important that we make the coaches’ poll the best it can be, and putting in place the recommendations coming out of the Gallup study will help ensure that,” AFCA executive director Grant Teaff said in a statement.
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Texas Tech coach Mike Leach, who voted in the coaches’ poll last year, isn’t sure keeping ballots confidential will change anything.
“It’s still going to be political no matter what happens,” said Leach, who had no problem disclosing final ballots. “There’s still going to be some politics and agendas involved with this no matter what. I don’t know if there is a way to avoid it 100 percent.”
I think Coach Leach is correct, though given that there’s a game that’s been designated as the “championship” game, I doubt it matters that much. The real question, I think, is why do we even bother having a coaches’ poll? Does anyone really think that during the season any coach is familiar enough with opponents that aren’t on their schedule to judge their merits relative to other schools with which they may not be familiar? We actually already know the answer to that, so why do we bother? What purpose, other than tradition, does the coaches’ poll serve?