Coaches college football poll under fire

By: Tom Korun
WFTS-TV, Tampa

Usually its the media that gets taken to task about unqualified judgments.  Now it's the college coaches.

From coast to coast, they look at their college football poll like a tooth ache, a royal pain.

So says the royalty among our national college football media. 

From my point of view, you can stick these polls......

in the Smithsonian.

First of all, no one is an expert, coach or media member.  If they think they are, they have already knighted themselves a legend in their own mind.

For crying out loud, these polls are subjective, open to individual interpretation.  

If ESPN's Kirk Herbstreit thinks the college coaches have their head in the sand voting Florida #1 instead of Alabama, that's his opinion.

I never fault anyone for speaking their peace.  God knows I'm not shy to yap.  

However, Herbstreit attacked the coaches by essentially saying do your research before voting.  In other words, the coaches have little to no knowledge of how teams are playing week to week.

That comes right out of the department of the obvious.  No kidding Sherlock!  

Last time I looked, I don't think there's a college coach in America who sits around on Saturday night after a game and reviews every single game to make an 'educated' vote.

That's ludicrous.  For Herbstreit to say Alabama has played more consistently than Florida and deserves to be #1, that's about as vanilla an interpretation as you can get.

Let us get into it a bit deeper.  Why has Alabama played more consistently than Florida?

Could it be Tim Tebow's concussion and tentative play against Arkansas have anything to do with it.  Could it be the Gators were without four of their starting defenders?

I don't really care if Florida is ranked #1 or #2, and neither do the respective coaches.

You see, they come from the premier conference in America, the SEC.  If all plays out the way we expect, Alabama and Florida will meet in the SEC Championship game.

If that happens, and both remain undefeated, that game will in essence be the real BCS National Championship matchup.

But in the end, some other team sitting third will back-door their way in.

Hey, it happened to Florida and they went on to win the national title.

This whole ranking system is antiquated.  First of all there are too many polls.  

I say this.  If we are to have rankings, lets put the media, coaches and whoever the heck else they want to vote together.  One poll, one pecking order.  

That way the voting media can flex their checks and balance system on the "uninformed"' coaches across the country.  Right Herb.