Chris Dufresne: USA Today coaches reverse call on secret ballot decision
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It’s been a tough year in the replay booth, but college football finally got one right when coaches in the USA Today poll today overturned a decision made last off season to quit making their final ballots public in the final Bowl Championship Series standings.
There was ‘irrefutable proof’’ this was the correct call and that the coaches had no choice but to do this or risk getting tossed out of the BCS starting in 2010.
The American Football Coaches Assn. last January commissioned Gallup to find ways to improve the USA Today poll. Gallup suggested the AFCA could produce a more accurate index if the coaches made their votes anonymously.
Well, isn’t this just what the coaches wanted to hear!
Most coaches never wanted their votes made public to begin with. They were forced into transparency after some suspect secret vote juggling in 2004 involving a BCS bowl berth battle between Texas and California. In one of the BCS’s darkest chapters, Texas edged Cal by a slim points margin for the Rose Bowl berth, setting off arguments and cries of conspiracy. In the aftermath, the Associated Press pulled its poll out of the BCS formula.
After four years of having to their final votes exposed, and sometimes ridiculed, the coaches were all too happy to have Gallup recommend going under ground again.
But it was never going to fly with the BCS, which immediately sent signals that the AFCA had better reverse field or risk no longer being part of the BCS formula.
Today, the AFCA wisely acted and acted wisely.
‘The AFCA agreed to be a part of the BCS selection process when we were asked by the commissioners in 1998,” AFCA Executive Director Grant Teaff said in a released statement. “As with past decisions by the AFCA and the FBS head coaches, we are again acting in what the coaches believe to be the best interest of the game.”
That’s just mumbo-jumbo for saying we got it wrong before, but now we got it right.
-- Chris Dufresne
