Your Take: The Story Behind the Poll

Last year, FBS coaches were “polled” about the controversial Bowl Championship Series and in the process got used as propaganda.

As everyone knows, opinion polls are a complex business. The people that run them best are experienced, highly-trained and well-paid professionals. It’s for good reason. You can garner almost any answer you want from a poll depending how the question is asked. Politicians, business and others will pay top dollar to either get manipulated or honest results. A smart pollster can deliver either at will.

In this specific case, the question assured the result. The “poll” asked whether coaches “prefer the traditional bowl system over a playoff.” Not surprisingly, a whopping 93 percent of coaches chose the bowls.

Having spoken to many FBS coaches through the years as a columnist at Yahoo! Sports, I know the 93 percent number isn’t even remotely accurate. In fact, I’ve actually have never met an FBS coach that isn’t interested in exploring some kind of better system for the sport. Like the players, they want to settle the issue on the field.

However, that false poll result was taken by the BCS public relations team and repeatedly cited as a reason why nearly all coaches are opponents of any type of postseason advancement. Unfortunately, it was used in an attempt to stifle debate and preserve the status quo.

Here are two reasons why the entire poll was bogus and why coaches should think twice about answering what appears to be harmless poll questions about college football.

1. The question compares a known entity (the traditional bowl system) with an unknown entity (a playoff).

Let’s start with using the term, “traditional.” That’s a positive adjective that appears before one choice but not the other. No legitimate poll would use that wording. The larger issue is this: what playoff system are we talking about? A Plus One using the bowls? A four-teamer seeded after the bowls? An eight-team with games played on home fields? How about 16-teams with automatic qualifiers from each conference? Former Texas Tech coach Mike Leach even has a 64-team proposal. How about that one?

No one knows. The poll never specified. It’s a bad question.

Later in the same poll, coaches were asked about their interest in a “Plus One”. There are a lot of ways to run a “Plus One” and since the specifics weren’t cited, it too is a bad question. Even still, with just the most basic of alternatives, coaches split 50-50. The BCS PR folks never mentioned that. They stuck with the 93 percent number.
2. The question is built on a false premise.

As we show in painstaking detail in the book “Death to the BCS: The Definitive Case against the Bowl Championship Series”, the question concerning the post season is not bowls or a playoff, it’s bowls and a playoff. College football can, and would, have both.

It’s all in how bowl games operate financially and, most importantly, how conferences and universities currently subsidize most of their existences with ticket guarantees and the assumption of travel costs. As every coach knows, most schools lose money on bowl games – if it wasn’t for their conference taking revenue from bigger games to cover the losses, then the smaller bowls would go out of business.

As such, bowls don’t operate in a true capitalistic system. At least two dozen of them exist solely because schools are willing to keep them alive so they can enjoy the bowl experience. They are welfare cases.

That’s fine. It’s each university’s and conference’s money to do as they see fit. It also means that as long as schools and leagues are willing to continue losing money on the Insight.com Bowls of the world, they aren’t going out of business. Ever.

“Of course bowl games are going to survive (a playoff),” Mountain West Conference commissioner Craig Thompson said. “If you understand the business, you know the bowls are not going to go away if a playoff is implemented.”

Coaches understandably don’t want to see the bowls go away. In 2010 there were 35 games, which meant 70 of the 120 teams will reach a bowl. That helps job security, earns bonuses and can assist in recruiting. There’s also the matter of 15 extra practices. And they are a lot of fun.

Why give all of that up so just four or eight or even 16 teams can go to a playoff? You wouldn’t. Except you can have a full playoff and maintain all the bowl opportunities. You could even expand the reach of the bowl system to include more teams. A playoff would also flood college football with hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue, driving up coaching salaries, budgets and facilities.

If coaches getting paid more had been mentioned in the “poll”, that 93 percent number might have been flipped completely around. The issue for coaches going forward is to understand that what may look like a harmless question will yield a result that can, and likely will, be used for whatever various sides of debate. A faulty question will yield a faulty answer.

College football coaches sacrifice so much for their teams and work so many hours in pursuit of honest competition. It’s my impression, speaking with so many of you, that you are frustrated by a postseason system based on the views of often disinterested voters and computer formulas that actual quantitative analysts have declared “nonsense math.” You want to play the game on the field, not through the media.
From Joe Paterno on down, coaches have always told me they want better for their sport. Thanks to last year’s poll result, the BCS is telling the American public the exact opposite. So be careful what you answer. u