Poll Ground Rules

bokonon90 · Thu, 26 Apr 2001 09:25:55 -0700

In the interest of hopefully avoiding all sorts
of controversy (which will likely occur anyway,
given past experience), I would like to open a
discussion of poll eligibility. 

Namely, what to do
about non-US programs. Some people vote for them,
others don't. The end result is a listing that no one
finds satisfactory and conveys nothing meaningful about
these programs. 

 Some people interpreted the
"de-listing" of Oxford from an enmuerated ranked list as some
sort of "loss of prestige" when it probably only
reflected a combination of fewer total ballots (thus making
it harder for any program to get five votes) and a
receding memory (the great majority of programs never play
against or even see Oxford or any other program outside
the US, and by Pre-Nats time, the last NAQT ICT, the
only time anyone on these shores would normally see
Oxford, was a year ago.) In the case of Oxford, there was
also some confusion about whether Oxford's many
separate colleges counted separately, but since they sent
a unified front to St. Louis, that issue seems to
have vanished. 

The bigger issue in the past
has been with Canada, since there are and have been a
small number of teams from Canada playing at US
tournaments and/or against US schools. 

The case
against limiting the poll to the USA sounds something
like this : 
It would be arbitrary (and, further,
contrary to the circuit's stated goals) to exclude non-US
programs from poll consideration. Some would claim that
it's slightly jingoistic. Unlike in the past, we do
have _some_ data points, and arguably not too many
fewer than most people on the east coast have about
Stanford, Berkeley, et al. In fact, in some cases, the data
point is NAQT ICT, the broadest and most-follwed (by
the circuit) of the national championships. Oxford,
by finishing in the top 10 at ICT, deserves to be
considered fairly for a spot, and it is not hard to imagine
someone now, or in the past or future, to imagine someone
making a case for a Canadian program. 

The case
for exclusion sounds like this : 
This poll is not
designed to take into account Canadian or British schools.
As far as anyone in the US knows, both countries
normally play a variety of QB largely alien to us, and
even if they don't, do you really want a bunch of
Americans, most if not all of them poorly qualified, casting
judgment on Canadian and British QB? The sports polls
(like the NCAA basketball polls) this poll is based on
have no qualms about excluding schools from Canada or
anywhere else from its poll, even if they play the same
game. And yes, they do play every so often against US
teams, but very few data points exist. Even West Coast
programs few teams back east ever see have some points of
comparison (For example, suppose Stanford finishes Xth at
NAQT/ACF some year, and UCLA, while not there that year,
did compare favorably with Stanford on the western
circuit. While far from ideal, it's a decent place to
start when evaluating UCLA ; it's harder to do this for
a school in Canada or Britain.) Further, lots of
people will, in practical terms, simply neglect them (a
problem with the West Coast teams too, but to _far_ less
a degree) if even if they are eligible, producing
results that don't really reflect anything.