First a little background:
Dick Harmon of the Deseret News (out there in Ken’s neck of the woods), a voter in the new Harris Poll, which is part of the BCS ranking system, voted PSU the #17 football team in the country this week. That has raised the ire of many PSU football fans (see this Centre Daily Times Blog post), caused numerous rants and rages on PSU internet forums, generated a plethora of emails to Harmon and his superiors, and even inspired this column by a local sportswriter, Dave Jones.
This paragraph by Dave caught my eye (my emphasis added)
Harmon writes for the Deseret News, one of two papers in Salt Lake, is 52 and has been writing about college football for three decades. He also exposes his ballot every Monday on the Deseret News site, deseretnews.com, which is more than you can say for most Harris voters, let alone the opaque coaches who let underlings fill out their ballots every week on the other poll with understood directives never to vote that Son of a Gun from So’n’so State above No. 24.
The underlings line hit home.
Back in 1972, a friend of mine was a sportswriter for a local paper here in State College and was a voting member of the Associated Press Basketball poll (he shall go nameless because he’s still in the business and just might want to regain his AP vote some day). Right around this time of year he was supposed to submit his ballot for the preseason AP poll. Just like this year, PSU was hot in the middle of the football national championship picture (at the time we were 8-1 and 7th ranked – we wound up 10-2 losing to #2 Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl – USC won it all at 12-0). Just to show you some things never change, basketball took a back seat to football and my friend asked me to put together a preseason ballot for him because he was too tied up with football coverage. I quickly agreed.
At the time, the AP’s list was a top twenty and you only voted for the top 15. I quickly dove into my research (if only the internet existed back then I could have been much much more thorough). I came up with fourteen teams without too much trouble but was having a hard time settling on a 15th. Then I had a brainstorm – Ken was going to school at Illinois State and he had told me they had a pretty good team, why not do him a favor and plug them in at #15. So be it. I then called him up and told him that as long as his team kept winning I would guarantee that they would appear in the “among those also receiving votes” category.
Damn, if that little school didn’t keep winning. For the first couple of weeks, my little vote meant that they were at the bottom of the “others” category but, after a while, lo and behold they started getting votes from others. They eventually got to about 11-0 and were getting close to the top twenty when their bubble burst and they lost. I would like to think that my original vote caught the attention of other voters and they started to pay attention to the Redbirds as they maintained their winning streak. If it weren’t for me maybe they wouldn’t have gotten any national exposure that year.
Without that exposure, maybe no one would have noticed their 6’6″ guard that was lighting up the conference, eventually earning him a consensus All-American spot and a first round draft by the Phila 76ers which he parlayed into a long time basketball playing, coaching, and broadcasting career. Yup – if it weren’t for me, Doug Collins wouldn’t be where he is today. He owes it all to me. 
All kidding aside, I actually had a lot of fun watching Illinois State make me proud of that vote that I initially cast for them. That year also gave me an appreciation for how difficult a job it is to be a voter, particularly in those days when there was no way to see most of the teams you actually were voting for. The only thing you could base your vote on were scores that rolled across the wire services. Even finding a game story was extremely difficult then.
It is easier now but it’s a daunting task and I don’t envy the guys that try to do it (that’s why I am a fan of the computer polls – that and because I’m a computer geek to begin with). At least guys like Dick Harmon put their vote out there for all to see (and thus get some feedback). It’s the secret votes that bother me the most. You can also bet that some of those votes, particularly in the preseason, have as much validity as my “my little brother goes to school there” vote.
