Should we believe the polls? Are they really a reliable predictor of who will come out on top in the end? Of who will do what to whom? Seriously: What are the chances that Clemson, currently leading in the oldest of polls—which has been conducted by the Associated Press since 1936—will be the 2020 college football champion?
Oh. Those polls. The ones relating to the Electoral College.
But we’re still talking about surveying, no? Canvassing? Inquiries into public opinion from a sample of people? We are considering margins of error and predictions that occasionally are wrong. (Think of the grief that fivethirtyeight.com creator Nate Silver has had to deal with the last four years).
The urge to question the rock-solid certainty of these reports brings to mind celebrated old New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel, whose teams dominated the 1950s but, at age 70 in 1960, was informed that an AP bulletin said he was about to be fired. “What,” Stengel wanted to know, “does the UP say?”
The UP was United Press, AP’s rival wire service (for which I worked in 1969-70 when it was called United Press International and still was a viable competitor to AP). Appropriate to this discussion, the AP and UPI were primary disseminators of the college football polls for decades until the UPI poll, its panel of judges made up of coaches at the highest level, handed its ratings list over USA Today.
It’s certainly worth noting that, during my time at UPI, there were confirmed cases of coaches outsourcing their votes. Some, not wanting to bother with having to measure colleagues’ teams, quietly turned the chore over to the sports publicists at their schools. Others, reasoning that a victory—even a loss—against a highly rated opponent was good for their own status, consistently ranked their upcoming opponent somewhere in the Top Five. No matter that team’s previous success.
So much for thorough analysis. Which would not have come as a major surprise to the founder of the AP poll, Alan Gould, who admitted outright that his purpose simply was “to develop interest and controversy between football Saturdays….to keep the pot boiling.” To Gould, sports was “living off controversy, opinion, whatever. This was just another exercise in hoopla.”
But the late Mickey Carroll, with whom I spoke years ago during Carroll’s long tenure as director of the highly regarded and widely cited Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, argued that the AP and UPI exercises weren’t “real polls,” because a real poll “takes some sort of group and, in a scientific way, sees how they feel.”
The college polls don’t do “a big enough sample,” Carroll said. “If they said, ‘Let’s poll football fans across the nation on how they feel,’ that’s a poll.” Quinnipiac’s methodology requires telephoning by some 300 interviewers, with computers randomly determining the numbers to be called. To obtain a typical total of 1,200 responses, Carroll said “at least double that number” had to be contacted over five to seven days.
The AP football poll, meanwhile, uses the same 65 sportswriters and broadcasters to determine their weekly ranking. In the USA Today poll, there are 62 coaches involved. In terms of prognostication, a recent review by The Bleacher Report website found that, of college teams ranked first in the AP and USA Today pre-season polls from 2004 to 2013, only three of 10 maintained top status through the season.
Mixing metaphors, that reduces the gridiron rankings to pretty much a jump ball. Marginally accurate in terms of forecasts. And while political polls aren’t perfect, either, the Electoral College—I’ve been unable to find a cheer or fight song for the institution—keeps finishing No. 1. So far, anyway.