Rate Debate

You’ve got to be a football hero to get along with the beautiful girls, assuming your aspirations rise no higher than a date on Saturday night.

But to be a real player in college football, to make an impact, to decide who wins the national championship and who doesn’t, you’d be better off learning how to transcribe coaches’ cliches on deadline, or how to tap out press releases about injured redshirt freshmen, or how to design a computer program that accounts for strength of schedule, strength of conference and strength of the coaching fraternity’s dislike of Steve Spurrier.

The most powerful team in college football this year operates under the abbreviated heading of BCS--that’s BS if you root or play for Kansas State--and features a roster that includes:

* A 50-year-old mathematician from MIT who ponders such weighty hypotheticals as “Suppose one team is rated 1, 5 and 20 and another team is rated 6, 6 and 6. Who’s better? What’s a better triplet--1, 5 and 20 or 6, 6 and 6? That’s actually a very subtle question. It’s not trivial.”

* Two University of Washington graduates who got miffed about the Huskies going 12-0 in 1991 and not winning the national championship outright, so they developed a computer formula that indeed delivered Washington its rightful standing as No. 1.

* The woman in the survey department who tabulates the New York Times’ best-sellers list.

* Seventy sportswriters who are asked each week to name the top 25 teams in college football, who may go the entire season without actually seeing 25 teams in college football.

* Sixty-two college sports information directors who have to prod, cajole and/or assist their football coaches to vote for the top 25 teams in the country every autumn Sunday. Or, failing that, phone in the vote themselves.

This is how college football will determine its 1998 NCAA Division I-A national champion.

This is considered a substantial improvement over how college football used to determine its national champion--by a regionally biased vote of sportswriters from 1936 through 1997, with an assist of self-serving votes from college coaches from 1950 through 1997.

Twenty-eight times since 1936, this has resulted in at least one undefeated team coming away without at least a share of the national championship.

Ten times since 1954, and three times in the 1990s, this has resulted in split national championships.

It happened last season when Michigan and Nebraska engaged in perhaps the most stirring round yet of What’s Wrong With Allowing A Popularity Contest Determine Your National Champion?

Michigan and Nebraska both ended the regular season undefeated, but Michigan was ranked first in both the writers’ and coaches’ poll--largely because Nebraska required a miraculous (and technically illegal) play to stave off Missouri in November. Michigan then did what it had to do in the Rose Bowl--it defeated Washington State--and sat back to revel in its just rewards.

The writers delivered as expected, keeping the 12-0 Wolverines atop their final poll. But a day later, Nebraska routed Tennessee in the Orange Bowl in the final game of Cornhusker Coach Tom Osborne’s long career. Popular among his peers, Osborne sat stoically in the postgame interview room while his players lobbied emotionally and unabashedly for the coaches to come through with a parting gift for Dr. Tom: Their No. 1 vote.

“If you had to play one game with your job on the line,” Nebraska quarterback Scott Frost challenged the ballot-holding coaches, “who would you rather play, Michigan or Nebraska?”

Just like that, 21 coaches who had voted Michigan No. 1 in their previous poll, and one who had split his vote, switched horses--and Osborne got his title share, 32 votes to 30 for Michigan.

“A joke,” says Boston Globe college football correspondent Mark Blaudschun, who has voted in the Associated Press writers’ poll for the last 14 years. “I will swear until I die that if Tom Osborne had not announced he was going to retire, [Nebraska] would not have overtaken Michigan. No way it would have happened.”

This kind of debate has dominated far too many college football seasons of late. Nebraska or Penn State in ‘94? Florida State or Notre Dame in ‘93? Miami or Washington in ‘91? Colorado or Georgia Tech in ‘90?

But because the powers that be in college football--read: university presidents and bowl presidents--oppose the safety and the sanity of a championship tournament, polls and ranking systems will continue to inadequately address the question, “Who’s No. 1?” at least into the next millennium.

Still, acknowledging the need for a better way, the powers that be in college football signed off on a modification of the old poll system for 1998: The already notorious bowl championship series format, a melding of the writers’ and coaches’ polls with three computer rankings--the New York Times, the Seattle Times and the power rating index created by MIT graduate Jeff Sagarin that regularly appears in USA Today.

The grand idea: Throw the subjective into the blender with the objective, push frappe and wait for the perfect No. 1 versus No. 2 matchup to emerge.

The distressing reality: Three teams--Kansas State, Tennessee and UCLA--are undefeated this Thanksgiving week and only two can play in the BCS’ designated championship game, the 1999 Fiesta Bowl.

“I think there’s going to be a decimal war at the end,” Sagarin says warily. “If all three teams win out, one team is going to get decimaled out. . . . And I don’t think the team out is going to have a press conference and say, ‘Well, on the other hand, you know . . . ‘ I think they’re going to be cursing and screaming.”

UCLA Coach Bob Toledo could be among those cursing and screaming the loudest come Dec. 6, when the BCS releases its final rankings. For the time being, Toledo breathes deeply and flatters the BCS for being “closer to what we’re looking for, but I don’t think it’s the total answer.

“I totally believe that until it’s played out on the field, nobody will know who the true national champion is.”

Consider us all clueless, then.

And we have been, for more than a century.

OK, CLASS, WHO’S NO. 1?

A math professor, a sportswriter and a football coach looking out after his best interests--that is how this ratings-rankings madness got started in the first place.

The year was 1926. At the University of Illinois, professor Frank Dickinson admitted to one of his classes one day that he had a rather peculiar hobby. Just for the fun of it, he said, he liked to sit at home and work with a mathematical formula that ranked college football teams.

One of Dickinson’s students happened to be the sports editor of the Daily Illini, so, of course, Dickinson’s confession quickly wound up in print.

A Chicago clothing manufacturer named Jack Rissman saw the story and approached Dickinson about using his formula to rank the teams in the Big Nine--later the Big Ten--since all of the conference’s teams did not play each other.

Soon, the Dickinson Big Nine rankings had caught the eye of Notre Dame Coach Knute Rockne. According to college football researcher Robert Rosiek, Rockne contacted Dickinson about using his formula to rate the best teams in the country.

“Then Rockne said to him, ‘You know, I had a pretty good team back in 1924. I want you to go back over 1924 and 1925 and do your system on those seasons, just to see if I’d be No. 1,’ ” Rosiek says.

“So he did two retroactive seasons. And sure enough, the ’24 Notre Dame team ended up in first. That, in a nutshell, was the Dickinson system.”

From 1926 through 1940, Dickinson’s top-ranked team at the end of each season was considered the nation’s mythical champion and received a trophy as such--first the Rissman National Trophy (retired in 1930 after Notre Dame won it for the third time), then the Knute K. Rockne Intercollegiate Memorial Trophy (retired in 1940 after Minnesota won it a third time.)

College football was booming in the 1930s. Looking for new ways to feed the beast, Associated Press sports editor Alan Gould put together his postseason rankings in 1935. It was a “poll” in only the loosest sense of the term. Gould had the only ballot, but he did seek counsel from friends and co-workers in the newsroom before naming 8-0 Minnesota, 9-0 Princeton and 12-0 SMU his tri-champions for the 1935 season.

“It was a case of thinking up ideas to develop interest and controversy,” Gould would say years later. “Papers wanted material to fill space between games. That’s all I had in mind, something to keep the pot boiling. Sports then was living off controversy, opinion, whatever. This was just another exercise in hoopla.”

If controversy was the objective, Gould’s first rankings were a smashing success. Angered over the Gophers having to share their championship with rank interlopers from Princeton and SMU, one small town in Minnesota went so far as to hang Gould in effigy.

This could possibly get out of control, Gould’s friends in the business quickly noticed. One of them, Cy Sherman of the Lincoln Star in Lincoln, Neb., suggested Gould diffuse the blame by polling sports editors of AP-affiliated newspapers the next year. Sherman said he was simply trying to “get Gould off the hook.”

So, in 1936, the Associated Press poll of sportswriters debuted, mired in dissent and outrage from the start. Minnesota and Northwestern both finished the season 7-1, and Northwestern beat Minnesota, so which school topped the AP’s inaugural year-end rankings.

Minnesota, of course.

(At least Gould had found a way to avoid the effigy noose that year.)

In terms of national clout, the AP rankings soon eclipsed the Dickinson System, contributing to Dickinson’s decision to shelve his ratings after 1940. AP had the run of the place until 1950, when the rival United Press started its poll--only with college football coaches doing the voting.

A great moment in the history of media-coach relations this was not. Sportswriters and coaches had one more thing to argue about--and the bickering continues to this day, even with both factions supposedly operating under the same BCS umbrella.

COACHES VS. WRITERS VS. COMPUTERS

The sportswriters don’t know what they’re talking about--that is the traditional charge of the coaches. They didn’t play the game, they don’t see enough games, they protect their regional interests, many are out-and-out homers.

And the writers fire back that because the coaches vote anonymously, they are unaccountable for their votes. Their ballots are riddled with self-interest, especially now, with BCS per-team bowl payments reaching $12 million. And who knows if they’re the ones actually doing the voting. Over the years, various coaches have admitted handing their ballots over to their sports information directors, assistant coaches, even sons and wives.

“The coaches’ poll is a joke, a total joke,” says AP voter Blaudschun. “One, they’re totally unaccountable. You don’t know how people vote. At least in the AP, my ballot and everyone else’s--our top five--gets printed every week. So you know how I vote.

“If anyone’s got a problem with that, they can let me know. And they have--many times in the past.

“Two, with the coaches, it’s kind of like voting how much their bonus should be. Really. They have a stake in who gets into a $12-million game. They can manipulate the poll. If Bob Toledo is trying to get into a $12-million bowl, he should have a say in whether he gets into that bowl or not? It’s ridiculous.”

Grant Teaff, head of the American Football Coaches Assn., which oversees the coaches’ poll, scoffs at such claims.

“They’re more accountable?” Teaff says. “Accountable means taking away from a team because a coach wouldn’t let his quarterback talk [to reporters]?”

Teaff refers to Kansas State Coach Bill Snyder, who drew the ire of the nation’s college football writers by refusing to make quarterback Michael Bishop available for interviews after Kansas State’s victory over Nebraska on Nov. 14. Kansas State, No. 1 in the coaches’ poll, trails Tennessee, 42 first-place votes to 24, in this week’s AP poll.

As for keeping the coaches’ ballots secret, Teaff dryly observes, “The writers don’t have to play each other the next week. You ever notice that? It’s just the way it’s done. And there’s a valid reason for doing it that way.”

Blaudschun believes the writers have no business deciding who gets to play for a $12-million payday, either. During the last off-season, Blaudschun and several members of the Football Writers Assn. of America had a meeting with Roy Kramer, commissioner of the SEC and coordinator of the BCS ratings, to discuss the issue.

“We basically said we felt uncomfortable with the situation--that if we were one-half of the entity, we could affect who goes into the national championship game,” Blaudschun says. “Quite frankly, if it hadn’t been changed around, I was going to pull out of the AP poll. I wasn’t going to vote anymore.” (Chris Dufresne, The Times’ national college football writer, does not vote in the AP poll for that very reason.)

Kramer changed it by devising a four-tiered ranking system, which dilutes the impact of the writers’ and coaches’ votes by adding three computer-based ratings, factoring in comparative strength of schedule and deducting points for games lost.

Now, which computer ratings to use?

Sagarin’s rankings were the oldest and most respected, having appeared in the Boston Globe as early as 1974. His college basketball rankings have been used by the NCAA tournament selection committee since 1984.

The New York Times computer ratings debuted in 1979 and in two decades have gained a reputation for runaway quirkiness--Florida State is its current No. 1--although Times surveys editor Marjorie Connelly notes, “Usually, any kind of quirkiness is gone further on in the season. We’re usually not that far off from everybody else at the end.”

The longshot candidate was the Seattle Times, whose rankings debuted in 1993 through the wrathful inspiration of two scorned Washington Husky fans.

Jeff Anderson and Chris Hester were students at Washington in 1991 when the Huskies finished 12-0 and wound up No. 2 in the final AP poll behind Miami. Instead of simply getting mad, they decided to do something about it.

“It was an impetus,” says Anderson, who created a ranking formula with Hester in 1992, with the Seattle Times first publishing the results in the fall of 1993. “We decided to see if we could come up with a computer ranking system that was preferable to the polls and the other computer ranking systems out there. At least preferable to us.”

Anderson and Hester aggressively marketed their ratings, faxing them to conference offices across the country. When Kramer began canvassing conference commissioners about which computer systems they would like to see included in the BCS formula, Tom Hansen of the Pacific 10 suggested the Seattle Times.

“We said, ‘Let’s get an Eastern one and a Western one,’ ” Hansen says. “The New York Times was relatively well known and we had been seeing the Seattle Times for several years around the office here. It seemed to have merit to it and provided a reasonable measure of the teams.”

Anderson says he appreciates the plug, even if the concept of “East Coast” and “West Coast” computers prompts a chuckle.

Can a computer be regionally biased?

“Maybe it likes the electrical currents in that part of the country,” Anderson muses.

A CAUTIONARY TALE

Is this any way to determine a national champion?

Corky Simpson, sports columnist for the Tucson Citizen, thinks not, which is why he resigned as an AP voter after one season, 1992.

It was quite some season. Simpson was the only writer in the poll who voted Alabama No. 1 every week, bucking the conventional wisdom for 12 rounds before the Crimson Tide upset Miami in the Sugar Bowl to finish 13-0 and turned Simpson into a Tuscaloosa folk hero.

“I retired undefeated,” Simpson quips.

He quit, he says, because by participating, he came to realize “what a farce it was. I also got a little bit ticked off at some of the people who worked for the AP in New York because every week I’d call in and say ‘Alabama,’ they would say, ‘Oh no. You’re not going to pick them again, are you?’

“And I’d say, ‘Of course I am. That’s how I feel. I think they should be No. 1.’ Every week, I’d call in and they’d give me a ration of [grief].”

And that was from Simpson’s brethren in journalism. During the regular season, once his vote was made public, Simpson said he was deluged by mail and phone calls from angry Miami fans.

“One guy faxed me his rear end and wrote, ‘Vote for this!’ ” Simpson says. “The funny thing was, when Alabama went ahead and won the thing, I came home one day and there was a big TV truck with a giant satellite antenna on it. I had ABC and ESPN in my living room.

“And I know my neighbors must’ve thought I was a drug runner. Hell, they didn’t know. They probably thought the FBI was in my house and there was a big drug bust going on.”

Simpson says his one year on the AP panel “proved to me how ridiculous it is. Because here was some goofball who didn’t know squat about the power in college football and out of stubbornness, I just kept picking Alabama--and they won!

“I think there were 61 other voters then and nobody--nobody--picked Alabama No. 1. Right up to the Sugar Bowl, they still had only one vote. And the next day they beat Miami and in the final poll, they got all of those 61 votes. I mean, that’s stupid.”

Simpson believes the new BCS format is an improvement, but still terminally flawed for one reason: The writers are still involved.

“To give it to a bunch of guys like me out in the sticks who never sees Florida State except once or twice a year on television--I don’t know how good they are,” he says. “I know of a lot of guys out there who have a vote and they don’t know squat.”

But you know what they say about college football polls.

Squat happens.