COMMENTARY : Here Is One Vote for Polls

Goodness, what a flogging college football’s bowling and polling have been taking this week. Columnists and commentators far and near have taken word processors and microphones in hand and, holding nothing back, attacked the woeful lack of a playoff system in determining the national champion.

Some are irked that Notre Dame, which played the toughest schedule and knocked off top-ranked Colorado in the Orange Bowl on the final day of the season, wasn’t No. 1.

Some are upset that Miami, which padded its schedule with such stalwarts as Wisconsin, Cincinnati and East Carolina, not to mention Cal and San Diego State, was No. 1, even though the Hurricanes were the only guys who beat Notre Dame, although that wasn’t in a bowl game.

Some are vexed because Florida State, the only team that beat Miami, wasn’t voted the national championship.

And some are just plain disgusted with the whole business. Playing in bowls and voting in polls is a poor way of choosing a champion, they say, pointing out that every other sport uses a playoff system of some kind to give us the true end-of-season heroes.

Is there no one, other than the self-serving coaches, athletic directors and bowl promoters, who will defend the system we have, who will take up the cudgels for the status quo?

Well, ahem, yes there is.

Let us consider, for a moment, the primary lament of the anti-bowl, anti-poll guys, that a true champion cannot be determined without playoffs.

That pretty much assumes that the playoff system always gives us a true champion. But we all know better, don’t we.

Who, for instance, believes that the 1988 Dodgers were really the best team in baseball that year? And who, for instance, believes that Michigan was really the best college basketball team last season?

Those were teams that responded magnificently in unusual situations and they deserved all they got, but were they really the best?

And let’s consider, too, that the poll-bowl system has not served us badly.

In the Fiesta Bowl of 1987, No. 2 Penn State knocked off No. 1 Miami for the national title. In the Orange Bowl of 1988, No. 2 Miami beat No. 1 Oklahoma for the national title. And in the Fiesta Bowl last year, unbeaten and top-ranked Notre Dame won the title by drilling third-ranked West Virginia, having previously beaten No. 2 Miami.

Where a lot of people make a mistake is in believing that the poll system considers the entire season. That may be the ideal, but it’s not really the way it works. It’s more a week-to-week thing, although, arbitrary as it may be, there are some rules.

The key one is that nobody gets penalized for winning. Thus, if a team is ranked No. 1 at the start of the season, and wins all its games, it will be No. 1 at the end of the season, too.

It didn’t work out that way this year but form was followed anyway. One of the other rules is that a team does not move ahead of another team unless that other team loses. Going into the bowl games, unbeaten Colorado was No. 1, Miami No. 2, Michigan No. 3, Notre Dame No. 4 and Florida State No. 5.

Colorado lost and dropped out of the No. 1 spot, giving No. 2 Miami a chance to move up, which it did by winning. Michigan lost and dropped out of No. 3, giving Notre Dame a chance to move into No. 2, which it did--at least in the writers’ poll--by winning. Florida State also won and moved up to No. 3 in one poll, No. 2 in the other, voted on by the coaches, who don’t understand the poll rules as well as the writers and penalized Notre Dame for winning.

All of that, though, really isn’t very significant. What is is that college football, Division I-A style, is unique in all the world of sports. In a world that considers orderliness a prime virtue, college football goes its own way, providing the kind of unstructured enjoyment not to be found elsewhere.

Contrast it with college basketball, for instance. The polls come out at the start of the basketball season and continue through the season, right up until the playoffs, when they suddenly lose their meaning.

In football, the polls--what could be more American than voting?--continue to provide countless hours of stimulating conversation and debate, not only up to but right on through and, as we see, after the bowl games, which manage to stir their own excitement, even though they fly in the face of playoff tradition.

In a word, the poll-bowl system is fun.

Sure, it’s different from the way things are normally done. But where is it written that fun has to be regimented? So college football is different. Vive la difference!