I've got to agree with the house! The mere fact that Izzy can come up with this scenario means they can too .... and they can adjust their vote to ensure that this outcome doesn't happen. I mean .. the mere fact that noisy is even in the top five is a pure fabrication of the human element. It's a nice academic exercise ... but the human factor would never let it happen in reality.
Is it possible that the harris poll people could manipulate votes? For example, could they put out a memo stating the likely matchups based on their poll results? If so, it is highly likely they would stop an SEC BCSCG.
I don't know if I would put that much stock into the brain power of these voters. Especially coaches who barely have time to even cast their vote, much less figure out how low they must put LSU to insure they don't make it to the BCS title game. I think 95 percent of the voters vote in good conscience.
Perhaps, and hopefully that's 100% true for all coaches...but what if that remaining 5% did realize the mathematical implications and decided to act against an SEC match-up for the title game? It wouldn't take more than a handfulf of coaches to rank us strategically low enough to skew the outcome. And with their votes now anonymous, this could happen without fear of public scrutiny.
That seems like bull****e to me. In the absence of transparency, you can do some tricky things to influence ordinal rankings.
I would think there is some checks and balances in place with the voting process whereby a red flag would be raised if a ballot came in with LSU ranked 25th, for instance. What is the recourse is anybody's guess. Does the ballot have to be resubmitted, does the ballot get tossed out completely, do they allow the ballot and then take away the coach's privilege (or writer for Harris Poll) of being able to cast their ballot any longer.
Yes, this could be easily analyzed after the fact by looking at the scores, or by limiting rank changes within a specified range. The ideal thing would be to impose these controls on the front end. There would likely be no public recourse given the newly approved veil of anonymity. And for the BCS to take action privately, they would surely be accused interfering with the “democratic” process. The problem is that "voting" is a misnomer here. This isn't a binary, democratic choice like electing a governor. This is a ranking exercise, and as such it's subject to manipulation. So again, built-in checks are needed on the front end to limit strategic bias. The loss of transparency is going to be a problem eventually, if not this season. Heck, with assured anonymity, Lou Holtz might have actually ranked us much lower than #2 after we won the championship in 2004!!
That's just it there is NO recourse....except now I think they can make the last vote public......remember in 2003 when the stoops at arizona voted usc # 6 in the country so brother Bob stoops and Oklahoma could get to the title game??? It's happens, as much as we don't want to think so it does.
