AJC > Sports > Tech > Blog > Archives > 2008 > December > 10
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Crunching the coaches’ poll
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A lot of you might have already seen this, but the final coaches ballot for the USA Today poll is made public. The USA Today website did a great job with the ballot; it’s interactive and allows you to look at the voting in a couple different ways. You can see it here.
I’ll give you some stuff I found interesting. Tech finished 15th, the third-highest team with three losses after No. 13 Oregon and No. 14 Oklahoma State.
Most coaches had them in the 14-15-16 range. Here are the outliers (I limited it to the coaches who slotted them four or more spots away from No. 15)
No. 9 Gary Pinkel, Missouri
No. 10 Tommy Bowden, Clemson
No. 11 Bret Bielema, Wisconsin
No. 19 Rich Rodriguez, Michigan; Jim Tressel, Ohio State
No. 20 Joe Glenn, Wyoming; Pat Hill, Fresno State
As best I could tell, out of the 61 coaches, 57 selected the Jackets as the top ACC team.
The four that didn’t -
Jeff Genyk, Eastern Michigan (Virginia Tech 15, Georgia Tech 16)
Pat Hill, Fresno State (Virginia Tech 12, Georgia Tech 20)
Steve Spurrier, South Carolina (Virginia Tech 16, Georgia Tech 18)
Jim Tressel, Ohio State (Virginia Tech 15, Georgia Tech 19)
Coaches who faced Tech, other ACC coaches, Les Miles and George O’Leary
Frank Beamer, Virginia Tech - 13 (Virginia Tech 23, Boston College 25)
Tommy Bowden, Clemson (formerly) - 10 (Virginia Tech 13, Boston College 16, North Carolina 25)
Bobby Bowden, Florida State - 16 (Virginia Tech 20, Boston College 23)
Sylvester Croom, Mississippi State (formerly) - 15 (Virginia Tech 19, Boston College 23)
Butch Davis, North Carolina - 14 (Virginia Tech 17, North Carolina 24)
Jim Grobe, Wake Forest - 14 (Virginia Tech 20, Boston College 25)
Les Miles, LSU - 12 (Virginia Tech 23, Boston College 24)
Tom O’Brien, N.C. State - 15 (Virginia Tech 20, Boston College 24)
George O’Leary, Central Florida - 13 (Virginia Tech 17, Boston College 22)
Mark Richt, Georgia - 15 (Georgia 16, Virginia Tech 23, Boston College 24)
The six ACC coaches with ballots ranked Tech an average of 13.7. The seven SEC coaches ranked Tech an average of 14.4.
I’m wondering, but are you more bothered by the coaches who ranked Tech lower than the average than you are pleased about the ones who ranked them higher?
I’m asking more out of curiosity and because I suspect that is the case. This is going way outside the realm of football, but I think that fans, and people in general, are more aware of when they think they’ve gotten worse than they think they deserve than they are of when they think they’ve gotten better than they think they deserve.
For instance, you often hear fans (or coaches or players) say, “The referees stole the game from us,” but you rarely hear, “Wow, we really got some lucky breaks.”
But, anyway, enough dime-store psychology. What do you think about the rest of the stuff?
P.S. this is totally non sequitur, but an answer to a question that was asked in the last blog and that I’d seen posed elsewhere. Tech will be the home team and, as such, will be allowed to choose its uniform (presumably white). Home-team status alternates between the SEC and ACC teams.
