Comments on: Who is Jon Wilner and Why Does He Have a Top 25 Vote? Gamecocks 4th? Alabama 6th?

By: tallguy

tallguy — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 10:30:53 +0000

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.

By: ScottVanPeltStyle

ScottVanPeltStyle — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 22:25:09 +0000

Jon Wilner is an alias for a bred vote of Lee Corso and Skip Bayless.

By: jgp3553

jgp3553 — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:56:35 +0000

“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.”

By: TheBigLead

TheBigLead — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:54:33 +0000

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.

By: jgp3553

jgp3553 — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:53:47 +0000

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.

By: lozo

lozo — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:52:12 +0000

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.

By: Pistol Pete

Pistol Pete — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:29:15 +0000

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.

By: lanalana55

lanalana55 — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 20:33:42 +0000

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.

By: Spectacular Sam

Spectacular Sam — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 20:26:53 +0000

Many coaches (SID’s) loosley base their polls of the AP’s as well.

By: Youarelookinglive

Youarelookinglive — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 20:25:03 +0000

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.