Post by j***@mich.comOne of the weknesses of the polls has always been "you lose. you drop, you win, you stay or go up". Who you lost to or beat is secondary. It's how
TCUs and FSUs get over-ranked. Numerous other exmples. The times that doesn't happen is almost always pollster bias, which is another weakness in the
polls. It was always better to lose early so you can recover as the season progresses.
I think the biggest example of this is 1993, when #2 Notre Dame beat #1 Florida State, only to lose to Boston College a week later.
The real question may not be so much, "Did #2 Notre Dame deserve to be #1 more than a team that lost to it" as, "Did a Notre Dame team whose only loss was to Boston College deserve to jump to #2 over a Nebraska team whose only loss was in the de facto national championship game?".
There's a new bias, if you ask me: apparently, there's a new unwritten rule where the CFP championship game loser should be ranked #2. How did a TCU team that got blown out by Georgia finish ahead of an Ohio State team that lost to that same Georgia team by a shanked field goal attempt about a week earlier? I was going to suggest a similar case for Alabama over Washington this year - but Alabama somehow finished fifth.
Post by j***@mich.comAP poll bias was actually researched in an academic study ten years ago. The conclusions were voters favored teams from their area, teams in large
market areas were favored, teams watched on national tv were favored, and W-L records were voted up or down with little knowledge of the team or
schedule.
Anybody familiar with my NOTCFP rankings may remember when I used the AP voters as the "committee members". Early in the season, they tended to favor teams in their area, but eventually they all honed in on each other.
Bonus RSFC Trivia while we're waiting for something to come out of this week's NCAA Convention (actually, pretty much all of the Division I stuff is Wednesday and Thursday) and the football rules committee: name pretty much the only instance where a school trumpeted a team's ranking in a poll other than using a #1 ranking to claim a national championship (I didn't mention any names COUGHucfWHEEZE).