Who is Jon Wilner and Why Does He Have a Top 25 Vote? Gamecocks 4th? Alabama 6th?
Uncategorized September 18th. 2007, 3:03pm
Slow morning. We hit the gym, return to our computer, and hot damn there’s some news happening. That Millersville University potential football scandal? Looks like the girl is reluctant to work with the police, and it may be over already. Colt Brennan is HURT! This is a serious downer, because after three weeks, the Hawaii gunslinger is the leader on our pre-Heisman board (starts after week four). Shawne Merriman is myspace friends with a porn star (we also urge you to look at this friend of Merriman’s … whatever she is selling, we are buying.) And lastly, the Fed just cut rates by half a point (!!), which is good news for your stocks, and good news for home buyers and bad news for home sellers. Sadly though, the US dollar is fucked, so hold off on that trip to Europe.
But we’d quickly like to play Fan IQ’s favorite game – picking on the pollsters. Many clueless voters seem to think Kentucky’s victory over Louisville meant nothing. Others are homers (Louisville 13th and Kentucky 24th?), Big East kool-aid drinkers (five in the Top 25?), a case of, ‘I can’t think of any more teams, so let me just throw UCLA in there’, and a drunk guy in California who put SOUTH CAROLINA 4th in the nation. When is the AP going to do a background check on this guy? Seriously – Jon Wilner, what are you thinking? Cincinnati ahead of Rutgers? Alabama sixth? Ahead of Florida? If anyone works with him, please email us so that we can confirm his ballot is one big prank.
20 Responses to “Who is Jon Wilner and Why Does He Have a Top 25 Vote? Gamecocks 4th? Alabama 6th?”
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September 18th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
This is why polls suck. PLAYOFF!! How sweet would have USC/LSU play winner of UF/BSU? Legitimate Champ (not saying UF isn’t, just implying there would be NO argument) + more entertaining football. One can dream.
September 18th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
This clown works at the San Jose Mercury News. And who is his sports editor? Yup, his wife.
September 18th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Seriously, the Gamecocks thing is unreal. Alabama 6th? They weren’t in the top 25 and because they beat Arkansas they leapfrog to 6th?
September 18th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
“This clown works at the San Jose Mercury News. And who is his sports editor? Yup, his wife.”
And who used to be gainfully employed at the Mercury News? Yep, Mr. Asshat himself, Skip Bayless.
September 18th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
And who owns the Mercury News? The devil of journalism himself, Lean Dean Singleton.
September 18th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Picking on the pollsters is so easy, and you’re dead-on in that some of them are abysmal. I was an AP voter more than a decade ago (in my previous career as a sports writer) and I doubt much has changed. Here’s how it works:
A vast majority of voters are beat writers for a specific team. As such, they see MAYBE 1.5 games on a Saturday, aside from the game they’re covering. They might see another one Thursday, depending on what they have to write for Friday. Bottom line, there just isn’t much time to adequately study whether Nebraska is better than Texas A&M or Oregon is better than Rutgers if you live in Athens, Ga. Let’s say you’re covering the Dawgs for a 7 p.m. kickoff. You leave your house at 4 to arrive at the stadium by 5. You catch some of the late afternoon games in the pressbox, but you’re also collecting notes and tidbits from visiting writers about the opposing team. Kickoff rolls around and you’re busy until your midnight deadline, catching scores every so often. By midnight, all but the late PAC 10 games are wrapped up and you watch some highlights before getting home (at the earliest) by 1 a.m. If you’re lucky, you’re asleep by 2. The next morning, the polls are due to the AP by (roughly) 9:30 a.m., so there isn’t time to do anything more than glance at the results from the previous night’s games before filling out your ballot. It takes a lot of time and effort to produce a ballot you feel good about, and even then it’s a crapshoot. The sad truth is, many sportswriters don’t take it seriously and just slap a Top 25 together in two minutes to get it done. And the coach’s poll is even worse, as SIDs or secretaries fill it out. The next coach I meet who truthfully admits he fills out his ballot each week will be the first.
If college football wants to do the right thing, it should appoint a committee of experts to produce a poll starting six weeks into the season. Kill the coach’s poll. The AP is a freestanding organization and can do what it wants, but it should postpose polls, as well, until that point. The experts’ job is to watch as much football as possible each weekend and formulate learned opinions on the matter. It wouldn’t be Moses coming down from the mountaintop with the truth, but it would be better than the system we have now.
Finally, TBL — Colt Brennan? OK, he puts up Playstation numbers, but Hawaii nearly lost to La. Tech. Lou-i-si-an-a Tech. I can’t help but think if he played against PAC 10 or SEC opponents every week, his numbers wouldn’t be as gaudy. Brennan’s candidacy, to me, is like Gordy Lauckbaum’s or Steve McNair’s — a nice story, but they shouldn’t win.
September 18th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
Jesus-I’m a South Carolina alum and even I can’t justify 4th. Not even top 15, really. That 17 last week seemed just about right.
And Alabama, puh-leeez. Arkansas has Darren McFadden (who is a god amongst mortals), and no one else–a retread QB with an unfortunate name, a defense not worthy of the name, and a coach who gets out-thought on a weekly basis. So until Nick Satan beats someone not as overrated as the Razorbacks, I’m running away from the Bama bandwagon. Especially since John Parker Wilson looks shakier than McNabb did last night. 3-name QBs never work out: call it the Billy Joe Tolliver Rule.
September 18th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Of course, John David Booty appears to be the exception that proves the larger rule.
But not Tennessee backup Jim Bob Cooter. If you’re going to have a 3-name QB, why not go all in like “Jim Bob Cooter?”
September 18th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
breaking news — the ap poll carries ZERO weight when it comes to determining a national champion, so who cares?
September 18th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
Not true. AP still crowns a national champion with its poll. It just doesn’t help determine who plays in the BCS title game. If the same situation played out as in 2003 with LSU winning the BCS title game and USC getting shut out of that game and winning the Rose Bowl and USC is voted No. 1 by AP voters, you can be damn sure USC will claim a share of the national championship — and it WILL be recognized in the college football world.
September 18th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
As for Pistol Pete’s posting: Look, if you don’t have enough time, then don’t vote. Or TiVo College Gameday Final and at least get some sort of semblance of what happened. But to put South Carolina in there at No. 4 is just ridiculous.
September 18th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Many coaches (SID’s) loosley base their polls of the AP’s as well.
September 18th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
It’s funny how The Big Lede runs this post just a few hours after Stewart Mandel called out Wilner.
(Go to No. 4 and No. 15 at this link:)
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/writers/stewart_mandel/09/17/power.rankings4/index.html
Is The Big Lead ripping off Sports Illustrated without acknowledgment? What’s up with that?
Also, if you bothered to do some Google-searching, you’d learn that Jon Wilner has a college sports blog, where he actually explains (justifiably) his AP poll voting:
You might want to check it out, especially since he already had S. Carolina and Alabama highly ranked.
http://www.mercextra.com/blogs/collegesports/2007/09/17/my-ap-top-25-poll-usc-up-ohio-state-in-and-out-goes-louisville/
And if you look back a couple weeks back, Wilner actually explains the sanctity of voting in the AP poll — and why he doesn’t follow everybody else.
September 18th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Youarelookingalive, you’re right. That’s the way it SHOULD be. I voted for one season and declined the next season because I didn’t have the time (I covered a major D-I program and assisted covering an NFL team). TiVo didn’t exist at the time, so all I had to go on was SportsCenter highlights.
The problem is, many sportswriters like the feeling of power they get by being an AP voter. As such, they don’t want to give that up. They also rationalize poor voting with, “Well, I’ll fix it next week. It’s not like it matters.” And, to them, it doesn’t. It’s just the rest of the country that (justifiably) gets worked up over it.
lozo is actually closer to the truth when he writes “it doesn’t matter.” I haven’t read Stewart Mandel’s book about Bowls, Polls and whatever else, so I’m curious to read what he has to say about it. My conclusion was that college football is a massive money-generating farce. True, it’s a beautiful, wonderful, fantastic, massive money-generating farce. But it’s a farce nonetheless. It’s run exclusively by and for the pleasure of major universities. The lack of a playoff system can only lead to one conclusion — the powers that be (read: university presidents at the BCS schools) don’t care what goes on … as long as the television paychecks keep coming in and 75,000-plus keep showing up 6-7 times a year. If they don’t take it seriously, you shouldn’t either.
September 18th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
who cares if the ap crowns a national champion? once those first bcs rankings come out, no one is looking at the ap poll anymore even if they were to begin with. admittedly, the bcs is a sham, but it’s what everyone is looking at. if you win the bcs national title game, you’re the national champion.
and that’s fine. i respect the ap deciding to not be apart of the bcs. but as long as the bcs exists, that’s the barometer.
heck, i can crown a national champion if i want. anyone can. if at season’s end, TBL names Boston College the national champion but LSU beats USC in the BCS title game, are you going to recognize BC as a national champion? so why lend anymore value to what the Associated Press decides at this point, especially when the voting is as nonsensical as shown in this post?
crown’em. i am who i thought i was.
September 18th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
Don’t bitch about the Big East guy at the Bergen County Record. He could have put USF in there and made it six.
God, I swear that the Big East (and its connection to ESPN) is going to ruin college football like it ruined college basketball.
September 18th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
Lanalana – Thanks for the link. We usually visit the front of SI once or twice a day, and this wasn’t on the front page, and we missed it. Mandel mentions Rutgers, but i didn’t see a mention of South Carolina or Alabama.
And somebody has since sent us a link to Wilner’s blog … which we were going to put in tomorrow’s roundup.
September 18th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
“who cares if the ap crowns a national champion? ”
Is that why ESPN declared that USC was going for a “Three-Peat,” while everybody (not just ESPN) still calls LSU the 2003 “co-national champions.”
September 18th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Jon Wilner is an alias for a bred vote of Lee Corso and Skip Bayless.
September 19th, 2007 at 6:30 am
What’s wrong with Cinci over Rutgers other than preseason speculation? Sagarin’s ratings have Cinci at 6 and Rutgers at 32. Seriously, it’s kinda hard to whine about preseason polls and then turn around and whine because some pollster ignores said polls and ranks teams on their body of work.