FanHouse Polls

Every Monday during college football's endless offseason, The FanHouse Walk will put last week's stories to bed and deliver the essentials to bridge that agonizing space between now and September.

You Can't Be Bad All of the Time -- First-year Tennessee football coach Lane Kiffin has built up a tremendous amount of antagonism this offseason. There's nobody to blame but himself, of course, but sometimes you have to give the Devil his due. For all his transgressions, try not to read too much into the story that Tennessee has been witness to 11 player departures. Wherever possible in college athletics, you want to look out for the best interest of the athletes but healthy, successful coaching transitions at big-time football programs almost require a good dose of roster turnover. Whether he's handled it right is up for debate but the raw numbers themselves should not be an indictment of Kiffin.

The San Antonio Express-News has announced that after this basketball season, it will no longer participate in Associated Press polls. The paper said it first considered this policy when there were controversies resulting from the AP poll's use in the BCS standings. But now that the AP poll isn't used in the BCS, what's the problem?

"There were other issues," [the paper's sports editor] said, "including the treatment of a New Orleans reporter who made an honest mistake voting on deadline last football season. That reporter was publicly humiliated by the AP, and we won't subject our own reporters to that kind of treatment.

"The bottom line, though, is the poll evolved into something it was never meant to be. So we won't be a part of it anymore."

That's a weak rationale. If you're concerned about having your reporters "humiliated" by mistakes in their poll votes, how about telling them to double-check their ballots? A reporter can be "humiliated" by mistakes in a column in the paper, too. The solution is to eliminate mistakes, not to eliminate columns.

Still, although I always vote in the FanHouse power poll and like checking out other polls, I do think people get far too worked up about polls in college basketball. After all, in a month we'll find out on the court which team is the best.

With Saturday's victory over FSU, Clemson moved back into top 25 in both the AP and Coaches polls.

The Tigers started the season at number 18, but dropped out after losing to Boston College in week two.

Currently, Clemson is 19th in the AP poll and 23rd in the Coaches. Stupid coaches, they don't know nothin' bout football.

Interestingly enough, the Tigers are one spot behind FSU in the AP poll but one spot ahead of Boston College. That makes absolutely zero sense. Let's see, we lost to BC head-to-head, but beat FSU head-to-head. Shouldn't BC be ahead of us and us ahead of FSU?

Yup, big time polls early in the season truly are useless.

I'm eagerly awaiting the results of this week's "BlogPoll" to see if the fans can makes some sense of this past week.

If anyone was thinking of selling their season tickets and moving to Afghanistan for a year just in case 2005 was no fluke, uh... I'd go ahead and get seats on GoatriderAir. Non-refundable ones. We have been cursed by the Trev, who ranks Michigan #2 in his intial top ten. Since Trev's picks are guaranteed to be as spectacular as Trev's NFL career, the peak of which is pictured at right, the only team more thoroughly screwed than us is #1 Auburn. (Observant readers may note that Auburn was also my choice for #1; observant readers can go to hell. Rest assured that Auburn will plummet spectacularly after this and several impassioned arguments against the Tigers.)

Before condeming Michigan and nine other teams to Poulan Weedeater Tire Emerald Bowl hell, Trev gets a shot in edgewise at, well, me and everyone else on the Internets:

I promise that my analysis will go beyond the mundane and the obvious. Mundane and obvious analysis comes from people who have never played the game. Football is a great game, but just because you once covered a team for your local college rag or watched a lot of games does not make you an expert.

No, Trev, mundane and obvious analysis comes from you. All the time. Until you decide to get fired to get away from Mark May.