Charlotte Fishwrap to pull out of AP poll next year

The observer won't participate in the AP Football poll next year because of the BCS mess. Good move, imo. These jackasses that moved Texas ahead of Cal should be shot.


The BCS is a mess, and as long as The Associated Press football poll is part of the problem, the Observer has cast its last vote.

Mack Brown's Texas Longhorns were on the verge of being left out, and he wasn't happy. He said as much on television after a Thanksgiving beating of Texas A&M, lobbying voters on national television to move his team ahead of other teams he called "less deserving."

Texas fans took it from there. They bombarded AP voters, including the Observer's Ken Tysiac, with e-mails imploring them to change their votes. Some were eloquent, many were insulting. Tysiac didn't change, but others did.

One Alabama voter, also a victim of the e-mail bombardment, moved the Longhorns from ninth to fifth -- still behind Cal on his ballot, but a gain of four precious poll points. The L.A. Times reported voters from three Texas papers -- Dallas, Fort Worth and Austin -- flip-flopped the Longhorns and the Bears.

In the end, Texas moved up in the Bowl Championship Series standings, on the strength of its movement in the AP poll and a slight improvement in the computer rankings. The difference in payouts? The Rose, where Texas will play, pays $7 million to $8.5 million per team. The Holiday, where Cal was relegated, pays $1 million per team.

With that kind of money at stake, the potential for abuse is great, and even though Tysiac's top seven teams stayed the same before and after lobbying by Brown and Texas fans -- and the Observer published his votes each week all season for the sake of accountability -- the mess calls the polling process into question.

The credibility of this newspaper is more important than the prestige of voting in the AP poll. Tysiac will complete this season, the last in which a reporter from the Observer will vote in a poll tied to the BCS.

The AP basketball poll? We don't have a vote this season, but we would consider voting in the future. That poll is for fun and to drive fan interest, and it's basically meaningless because the NCAA basketball champion is determined in a playoff.

Hey, now there's an idea ...

 

:applause:

 

good for them. i hope this bowl mess gets exposed as the fraud that it is.

 

not like it'll make any difference. I'm sure there wont be any trouble finding another newspaper that will participate in the voting.

 

whether or not someone will replace you when you abstain from something because of principles is irrelevant.