Tuesday, September 15, 2009

AP Poll Bias?

It's a pretty slow morning for football (and at work) so I was just looking around at pollspeak.com (A website that publishes the AP Top 25 ballots for each voter) and a few things stuck out to me. In particular the ballot of Nebraska voter Rich Kaipust. I thought his votes were kind of odd and very biased so I shot him an email to ask him if he could explain his voting. He has not yet responded (I sent the email yesterday)but I will publish his response here as soon as he does. The email was as follows:

Hi, I was just looking at pollspeak.com and I had a few questions that I wanted to throw your way about your AP poll. The first ranking that jumped out to me was how high you had Virginia Tech. This one puzzled me because I couldn't figure out why you put them higher than almost everyone else did. Then I read one of your articles and realized that VT is one of the Huskers future opponents and I couldn't help but wonder if their high ranking was maybe done to help Nebraska's SOS? The other teams that jumped out to me, I could not think of any explanations and so I was hoping I could get some from you.

1. Why did you rank North Carolina so high? Do you really think they deserve to be ranked higher than BYU after having beat The Citadel and Connecticut?

2. Why is Oklahoma St. still ranked so high after losing to Houston who you only have ranked at 21? Big 12 Bias?

3. Please explain why Boise St. deserves to be ranked higher than BYU? Is their home win over Oregon better than the Cougar's virtual road win over Oklahoma?

4.Why do you still think Oklahoma is still better than BYU, and 6th best in the country at 1-1? Maybe another Big 12 Bias?

I know you don't have to answer this but I will give you huge props if you have the guts to back up your opinion.

Thanks for your time


I'd like to look at a few ballots each week and email the voters that have somewhat fishy ballots. I guess we'll find out which ones have the cajones to back up their votes. For those wanting to see for themselves, here is a direct link to his ballot:

http://pollspeak.com/pollstalker/pollstalker.php?s=9&p=18&t1=16&t2=75&v=54&w=3&r=V

2 comments:

  1. Could you post a link to his ballot for reference?

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  2. http://pollspeak.com/pollstalker/pollstalker.php?s=9&p=18&t1=16&t2=75&v=54&w=3&r=V here is the link to his ballot. If you just go to pollspeak.com you can access any of the ballots

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