| | Well, congratulations to Roy Kramer, father of the Bowl Championship Series. After much concern that his formula that almost no one understands would deliver a title-game pairing that almost no one respects, his calculator crunched the numbers and arrived on the obvious Sugar Bowl matchup.
|  | | Bill Snyder's Kansas State teams have not earned the respect of current BCS voters. |
In other words, all those byzantine computer rankings and all those partially informed sportswriters and all those school publicity directors voting on behalf of the their coaches managed to live up to what fans have known for more than a week was a no-brainer -- that undefeated Florida State should face undefeated Virginia Tech.
The whole silly drama begs a question: If fans are smart enough to realize who deserves to play for the national championship, shouldn't they get a say in the BCS rankings?
That's right, let fans vote. When Kramer and his staff sit down after the season to review whether to tinker again with the BCS formula, they should add a component that recognizes the opinion of those who follow college football the closest to fill out an online ballot each week.
It won't happen, of course. But it should.
"Personally, I won't shut the door on it," said Charles Bloom, the SEC official who draws up the BCS formula for Kramer, when I presented with him with the idea of a fan vote. "But I don't see how we could do it without the bias."
That's a polite way of saying you can't be trusted. That Florida fans would never put the Seminoles in a national title game. That Nebraska will organize a campaign to get past Virginia Tech. That Catholics everywhere would ensure a high ranking for Notre Dame, regardless of record.
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Fans' choice
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Some of the official awards and situations that fans can now vote on through the Internet:
Major League Baseball all-star teams
NBA all-star teams
WNBA all-star teams
NHL all-star teams
NFL Pro Bowl players (fans get one-third of vote)
Baseball's All-Century Team
NFL Coach of the Year
NFL All-Decade Team
NFL Player of the Century
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Those fears are exaggerated. At ESPN.com, we have been running a weekly fan poll for five years. What we have found is that the vast majority of fans are surprisingly reasonable, and even when there are campaigns, the votes from one school have little impact on the collective whole. The top 10 teams in our poll usually mirror those in the writers' Associated Press and coaches' ESPN-USA Today polls, with only slight variations.
Sure, there will be some Stanford student who thinks it's funny to put the Cardinal at No. 1 each week, and some Minnesota alum who honestly believes the Gophers are the best team in the country. But all of the zealots combined are rendered irrelevant by the thousands of regular voters who appreciate the chance to have their opinion heard and want real results.
As former ESPN.com colleague Dan Shanoff says, "Nobody fears Lyndon LaRouche will be elected president, even though he gets a few votes." Shanoff believes so much in an empowered fan poll that he's even scratched out a business plan.
Shanoff argues that if the BCS were to sanction a fan poll, the rankings would be even harder to manipulate. The attention would attract millions of voters each week, if not tens of millions, making it nearly impossible for one school to orchestrate an effective campaign.
Kramer should talk to someone at Major League Baseball. If there's one vote that fans could be expected to screw up, it's for the All-Century Team; after all, how many of today's fans saw Lou Gehrig or Ty Cobb play? Still, Gehrig got more than twice the vote among first basemen as runner-up Mark McGwire, and among outfielders Cobb finished ahead of Ken Griffey Jr., the only current player on the ballot.
Junior placed eighth at his position.
Online balloting makes for intelligent voters. Baseball's project worked well in part because those who voted through the league's web site had reams of statistics to compare the credentials of the candidates. Any responsibly done BCS-sanctioned fan poll would have similar information at voters' fingertips, right down to how teams have done against common opponents.
Of course, the BCS online poll would also need a mechanism to prevent ballot-stuffing attempts. But this type of software is already available and there are ways, like registration, to screen voters. You may recall a flap last year about a Red Sox fan claiming to have gotten Nomar Garciaparra onto the All-Star team by writing a program that allowed him to vote far more than the allotted 22 times (the estimated number of paper ballots a stadium voter would have received if he went to games). Lost in mainstream media's outrage was that none of his votes counted -- baseball detected the fraud before any votes were tallied.
In other words, online voting worked.
Five years from now, a BCS poll for fans will seem like one of those obvious Internet opportunities, like Amazon.com, that in retrospect only a fool would have passed on early. Perhaps that day will come when Kramer and his lieutenants realize how much money a sponsor would pay to own the marketing rights to a poll that handles 10 million votes a week, and delivers a credible result. In time, maybe they'll give the whole job of ranking teams to fans.
Until then, fans will have to live with the fiction that a coach in the Big East knows more about the quality of Western Athletic Conference teams than they do -- when in fact the coach is too busy to know much about any non-conference team not on his schedule, and the sports information director who fills out his ballot each week only has time for a Sunday-morning check of the standings.
For now, fans will have to accept as faith that a beat writer covering the University of Washington is free of bias -- when in fact that writer may face a backlash from the team if he fails to vote them No. 1 in a national-championship scenario.
Worst of all, fans will have to take as wisdom that a computer program knows how to think more objectively about college football better than they do -- and not just one computer program, but eight of them. The only ranking each of them could agree upon was Florida State at the top. No. 12-ranked Marshall, who went undefeated against weak competition, was 11 in two computer polls, and 33 and 31 in two others.
Crazy as it sounds, people are smarter than computers.
ESPN.com senior writer Tom Farrey can be reached at tom.farrey@espn.com
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ESPN.com's Top 25 fan poll
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Bowl Championship Series rankings -- final
BCS has succeeded a second time
Florida falls to 10th in ESPN/USA Today football poll
Florida State No. 1 again final AP poll of regular season
ESPN/USA Today poll
Associated Press poll
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