The House Rock Built has the season's first official blogpoll roundtable, and it's potato-heavy, carbolicious midwestern goodness through and through. We answer below.
1. What's the biggest ripoff in this preseason poll? Either pick a team that's offensively over or underrated, or you can rag on a particular voter's bad pick (hey, we're all adults here, we can handle it).
Since we've decided that everyone's poll is the equivalent of the Togolese space program--low-budget affairs doomed to explode in spectacular fashion on the launchpad--we'll bypass slamming anyone else's poll, even if people actually did put Pittsburgh in their ballot at any spot whatsoever. (We just insured a winning season for Dave Wannstedt with that remark. Look what you made us do! On the upside, Mark May's misery will continue as long as the Wannstache is coach, which may ameliorate some of the anguish you'll feel watching him commentate this year.)
Virginia Tech gets straight jacked this year, and only because they've lost Marcus "Toddlers gotta get whacked, too" Vick at quarterback. This is a team that lives on a steady diet of whirling dervish defensive talent, a sterling staff all seemingly locked down for life in Blacksburg, and an offense committed to running the shit of the ball while occasionally letting the qb throw five yard passes on bootlegs.
It's not baroque design and grand strategy in action--it's lunchpail ball designed to win by stranglehold and rapid opportunism, which may be the optimal strategy in a conference that in its current iteration has been a race to the bottom as far as competition goes. (Look at the roster of BCS teams since the Miami/Virginia Tech merger--it's scanty at best, and mostly because the conference now occupies the same ground the Big Ten used to claim in the 1990s, a warre of alle againste alle where the conference champ would likely have at least two losses by season's end.)
The Hokies play hyper-conservative football that leans on the margins. It's elegant demolition on the defensive side of the ball; it's tooth-pulling boredom on the offensive side of things. Yet in a conference where games are decided by pro-style margins, it makes gobs of sense to play Beamer-Ball. Plus they've got Jenkins, and there's something to be said for that.
The most overrated? Notre Dame, but mostly because they've attracted the cyclops that is ESPN/ABC/OMGUSC!, who's now sending it nude poloroids of itself, texting every ten minutes, and probably has the Robot Genius thinking restraining order at this point. Really, to throw yourself at a team that soon after dumping USC...it's just trashy, really, just classless. We call relationship foul.
ESPN is starting to remind us of Stacey, the epitome of the creepy girlfriend (The picture of her as Stacey crashed, so this will have to suffice.).
2. What should a preseason poll measure? Specifically, should it be a predictor of end-of-season standing (meaning that a team's schedule should be taken into account when determining a ranking), or should it merely be a barometer of talent/hype/expectations?
Once, at a party, Stranko yelled out "It's 1998, where's my flying car, dammit?" The "flying car" conundrum is central to a poll or any other prognostication: when you look in the future, will you be the one who sees the internet or the internal combustion engine? Or will you be the one who sees flying cars, everyone speaking Russian, and you returning home to your bionic girfriend? (If you went to a school with the words "of Technology" at the end of the name, that's probably you.)
The Stonecutters have kept this one down too.
Put the gremlins of outrageous fortune, injury, and unheralded recruits who evolve overnight into world-beating assassins on the field, and trying to give birth to the perfect end-of-season poll becomes an act of science fiction. We feel like most people--ourselves included--are essentially regurgitating everything seen over the last six games of 2005 and projecting them into an arbitrary order. To put a little cayenne in it, the average pollster rides high on a few dark horses sprinkled into the recipe just to keep people awake and not thinking that...well, that they're just replicating the final poll from last season and posting it.
Which, for the first 6 weeks (at least,) is what you're forced to do anyway until the curds and whey begin to separate. Even then you'll be forced to make some drastic "market corrections" when your golden boy of a team dies on the field versus an unranked team maxing out their karma for the season in a single game.
So..winging it. That's essentially what a poll is. There's always elements of the beauty contest going on here, and always will be. We're all just playing tiara roulette at this point.
3. What is your biggest stretch in your preseason ballot? That is to say, which team has the best chance of making you look like an idiot for overrating them?
Anyone between 1-10? Auburn has the look of a team picked high by many because they've been very good over the past several years and not because of any standout talent, save high-stepping Kenny Irons and his amazing steel kneecaps. (Someone's going to get knocked out with one of those this year--tackling him must be like trying to tackle a piece of Futurist sculpture, with all those sharp edges flying around.) Take an SEC schedule and the possibility that an offense shy on wideouts might have problems moving the ball, and it's no slight on them to say that they might finish in the teens with a 9-3, 8-4 record and a lackluster bowl appearance. Many Auburn fans would agree, and feel like their team still sits a year out from cashing in potential and going for an SEC title.
4. What do you see as the biggest flaw in the polling system (both wire service and blogpolling)? Is polling an integral part of the great game of college football, or is it an outdated system that needs to be replaced? If you say the latter, enlighten us with your new plan.
Polling is and always will be integral because of the lack of a central organizing authority with any real power. It's a sport consisting of regional duchies of varying power and financial pull who negotiate for prime spots in season-ending exhibitions. The list of those realistically eligible for those exhibitions is whittled down by those polls, and for that reason alone they serve a vital purpose.
It is flawed, but mostly due to the lack of intersectional play and the minute data set presented by the season. The biggest flaw in polling is that paucity of data: what have you judged accurately after 48 hours of total experience, which is roughly how much game film you have to look at on one team in a year? (And of that 48, how much of it isn't just running out the clock and walking up to the line of scrimmage? Or shots of the coach picking his nose, Gamecock fans?)
The solution to the system would be more games, which probably won't happen, and the increasing professionalization of the game, which we'd weep over. One of the quicksilver things about college football is its regionality; anything seriously diluting that would denigrate the game and its intrinsic value. Creating a national game out of the multiple internecine conflicts raging around the college football world would be just that. And really: do you want more naked Poloroids from ESPN than you're already getting? Psy-chooooooo!
5. You're Scott Bakula, and you have the opportunity to "Quantum Leap" back in time and change any single moment in your team's history. It can be a play on the field, a hiring decision, or your school's founders deciding to build the campus in Northern Indiana, of all godforsaken places. What do you do?
We wished Florida, like every SEC school, had integrated sooner than they did.
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