Computer Polls, Dang man!!

A sad fact of the current football landscape is that the winner is partially decided by soulless, testicularly-deprived computer technology.

Are you not sure what a computer is, like this young bleacher report commenter?? Well, you are probably near one right now, unless you had a lackey print this out for you, in which case, I am extremely jealous of your large mahogany desk but I am slightly uncomfortable with the quill-pens, diamond-clad stuffed cat, and the Nazi paraphenalia in your bottom left drawer.

The first step towards computer polls happened around the time Calvin Coolidge was elected president of the United States, they invented a computer with a ridiculous number of tiny fingers that simply counted up votes. Back in the ole timee days, it took so long to count all the ballots that the candidates would die from consumption or typhus before the results could even be verified, even with generous use of leeches these old men could not last long enough. It is a little known fact that Rutherford B. Hayes, Chester Arthur, and James K. Polk were all dead before they reached office.

Computer football rankings actually date back to 1929, when Dick Dunkel created the Dunkel Index. Actually, that was before computers, he did it with paper. Holy shit, the first computer poll was on paper?! Why do we call them computer polls? How about call them Mathletic Papers or Numeric Ball Busters?

Some computer rankings are made by degenerate gamblers trying to find the secret Da Vinci Code at the heart of everything, so they can win a shitload of money and/or sell their rankings to less enterprising but equally desperate gamblers and/or get chased down the street with a valuable USB drive and have a nice PG-13 action-adventure w Queen Latifa + Will Smith.

Some computer rankings are made by engineer-nerds that just want to suck the fun out of life. The sort of people that track their bowel movements w an excel spreadsheet. They want to reduce everything to numbers, you know. It’s not like there aren’t enough numbers in sports? players have numbers, you can only have a certain number of players, the scores, the ground, the TV channel, the cable bill, divorce fees, the center for disease control, the goodyear blimp, ticket prices, cheese doodle prices. And anyway, why waste those hours watching Criminal Minds if you could be working on some insane impenetrable algorithm that can compare 1925 Dartmouth to 2008 Oklahoma?

Computer Polls you thought… Weren’t!

Another computer ranking system is called the Coaches Poll. These are less formulaic, since they are calculated by a school’s Sports Information Director as he hastily logs into Coach Head-Coach’s computer and quickly bangs out a bullshit list that passes the ‘eyeball test’, but doesn’t appear too adventurous, don’t want stray too far from the pack and get your coach grilled at the presser. “Coach, did your ranking bump for USC after a loss happen because of some particular strategy you saw, or did you even read the fucking thing? (see 2008 spurrier sec media days + tebow + ballot)”

Another BCS computer poll is called the H.A.R.R.I.S. Poll.  It stands for Highly Acceptable & Readable Rankings I’m Shitting-out. This big computer named H.A.R.R.I.S is a distant cousin to the original W.H.O.P.R. Oh WHOPR, commited suicide so many years via tic tac toe to save us all.

In Conclusion… Where do we go from Here, Humans??

Everyone knows this computer poll thing is just a fad, if not a purposeful distraction or outright non-human takeover attempt. My gut feeling is on non-human takeover attempt, luckily I am well stocked with crystals and agility magnets. But, empirical evidence suggests that, until the NCAA gets proper American Idol style text2vote system, with elimination shows every Thursday night, college football will be held back, crippled, even maimed. This train will not stop until we gather all the teams up, every week, only to announce the rankings after 11 KFC commercials (really starting to get hungreee for that dubble down!) and THEN, to zoom in to their crushed, man-child faces as their careers end, 1 team per week, serenaded by the sweet voice of Taylor Swift as we break for commercial.