do you think pollsters factor in teams schedules into their ranking. Example, if Ole Miss has a cupcake schedule, will pollsters rank them higher because the are more likely to be successful.
Pollsters should not factor in SOS but they do. That's what's wrong with the polling right now. You have a hard SOS, you start lower. What's up with that.
i don't have a problem with SOS after the season has been played and factoring it in during bowl selection season, but saying that a team should be ranked higher because its more likely they will stay there because of their schedule is a freakin joke.
Stewart Mandel wrote a really good article about this a couple of years back arguing that polls shouldn't begin until week five or so. The good news is that it actually seems like pollsters think about the rankings now and don't just do the old up a couple of spots for a win an down a couple of spots for a loss.
That's been my position for years. Preseason polls are about as useless as.. well.. preseason polls. I say start them up about half way through the season. This way everyone is well into conference play, and we have a pretty good idea of who's who.
Yes, but the BCS won't. Media pollsters are all lemmings anyway. They all jump on the same bandwagons.
doesn't that seem backwards? shouldn't strength of schedule be considered after the schedule has been played, or during the season? Take Ole Miss, they are ranked so high because they have an easy schedule, it makes the pollsters look like they know what they are talking about. Example: If at the end of a season there is no clear cut national championship match up, 2, 3, or maybe 4 teams with 1 loss, strength of schedule should be a factor, and i am not talking about out of conference schedule, im talking about overall schedule.
This has long been a pet peeve of mine in college football. Instead of doing their job, which is to project which teams in a vacuum are the best teams, pollsters instead decide they want to try to predict the final standings at the beginning of the year. This wouldn't be a problem if they would adjust accordingly during the season. But they don't. They say "How can you move Team A down? What have they done to deserve being dropped?" The real question is, what did they do to deserve to get there in the first place? Has another team accomplished more than them? There's no question in my mind that THIS is where the BCS system is really broken. Say what you want about computers, but at least they're objective, by definition.
