Post by hifigator on Jun 19, 2006 16:46:59 GMT -5
I have been thinking about this for a while. With all the talk of polls ... preseason polls, regular season polls, when should we release the first BCS rankings, which are largely influenced by the polls, which coaches actually fill out the polls themselves ... etc...
My question is this: has anyone ever seen specific instruction which the pollsters are supposed to use in filling out there polls? Have you ever heard any pollster describe such instruction? My guess is that there is no formal instruction, since I have never heard of any. I am guessing that the powers that be are just trusting that a large sample will effectively overcome a personal bias here or there. But on the larger scale I still think it to be a valid question.
When pollsters fill out there preseason polls, how many of them are asking themselves "what is the order of the 25 'best' teams?" In hoops it really isn't that big of a deal, because it is settled on the court. Over the course of the year the teams that deserve to be ranked higher will pretty much earn something close to the spot they deserve. But in football, many times a team starts higher ranked and maintains that relationship over a different "lower ranked" team as they both stumble through their seasons. Had the other team been higher ranked, it would deserve to stay in such a position relative to the other team, but nothing justifies them passing the other team. It just seems a bit screwy to me.
Look at it this way. I think too many pollsters are considering schedule when they are filling out there polls. I think they are too concerned with being "right" at the end of the year, than being accurate and sometimes I think this is both a self-fulfilling prophecy as well as a self defeating prophecy. They look at second-tier teams from power conferences and presume they will lose several games against very strong competition. Then they see a team that is fairly clearly the class of a lesser conference and are fairly confident that they will run the table or finish with no more than one loss. I think in many cases if you were to ask the pollster which team he believed would be the better team or which of those two teams would win on the field, more times than not he might predict one way, but then will turn around and vote the other way since he has more confidence in the lesser team winning with their weaker schedule.
I guess the bottom line is this:
Question 1: Should there specific instruction which the pollsters should follow with regards to voting?
Question 2: Should such instruction be to vote on the teams based on the strength of the team, regardless of expected wins and losses? (Note: past wins and losses obviously matter, but I am not talking about them.)
My question is this: has anyone ever seen specific instruction which the pollsters are supposed to use in filling out there polls? Have you ever heard any pollster describe such instruction? My guess is that there is no formal instruction, since I have never heard of any. I am guessing that the powers that be are just trusting that a large sample will effectively overcome a personal bias here or there. But on the larger scale I still think it to be a valid question.
When pollsters fill out there preseason polls, how many of them are asking themselves "what is the order of the 25 'best' teams?" In hoops it really isn't that big of a deal, because it is settled on the court. Over the course of the year the teams that deserve to be ranked higher will pretty much earn something close to the spot they deserve. But in football, many times a team starts higher ranked and maintains that relationship over a different "lower ranked" team as they both stumble through their seasons. Had the other team been higher ranked, it would deserve to stay in such a position relative to the other team, but nothing justifies them passing the other team. It just seems a bit screwy to me.
Look at it this way. I think too many pollsters are considering schedule when they are filling out there polls. I think they are too concerned with being "right" at the end of the year, than being accurate and sometimes I think this is both a self-fulfilling prophecy as well as a self defeating prophecy. They look at second-tier teams from power conferences and presume they will lose several games against very strong competition. Then they see a team that is fairly clearly the class of a lesser conference and are fairly confident that they will run the table or finish with no more than one loss. I think in many cases if you were to ask the pollster which team he believed would be the better team or which of those two teams would win on the field, more times than not he might predict one way, but then will turn around and vote the other way since he has more confidence in the lesser team winning with their weaker schedule.
I guess the bottom line is this:
Question 1: Should there specific instruction which the pollsters should follow with regards to voting?
Question 2: Should such instruction be to vote on the teams based on the strength of the team, regardless of expected wins and losses? (Note: past wins and losses obviously matter, but I am not talking about them.)
