Harris voter throws a bone to Vandals

No, I’m not the idiot who voted for Idaho in the college football poll this week.

I’m a much bigger idiot than that, and I can prove it.

Because I actually think that polls can be, you know, relevant. Credible. Even accurate – in sort of the same way that audience response to a “Porky’s” movie is an accurate measure of artistic merit.

Now, I admit this conviction was shaken somewhat Monday after seeing the debut of the Harris Interactive college football poll, which without the alert tip of an officemate would have escaped my notice.

Frankly, I didn’t know there was a Harris football poll. I thought the Harris people stayed out of the football business because they were swamped taking polls revealing that 49 percent of Americans think toilet paper should drape over the front of roll, 47 percent think it should fall down from behind the roll and 4 percent still prefer Reader’s Digest.

But it turns out Harris got involved this past spring, when the members of the Associated Press grew some ethics and decided they were didn’t want their poll used as a component in the Bowl Championship Series, which determines college football’s national champion, but not really. The BCS still had the coaches poll – football coaches being as unfamiliar with ethics as wombats are with rollerblading – and any of three dozen computer generated rankings, but decided the model was short on human beings.

So it went out and signed up 113 of them to vote in another poll. Plus Terry Bradshaw.

The new panelists are former coaches, former players, writers, broadcasters, athletic administrators, on-call plumbers, ex-CIA moles and carnival barkers who all have some connection to the game college football – even if it’s only a general understanding that there are these things called colleges and this game called football and that these colleges play football. You may think that a group of 114 isn’t too exclusive, but be assured the Harris people gave them the white-glove treatment and that a voter named Jason Rash resigned from the original panel when it was learned that he worked for an Atlanta masonry company and that his only connection to college football is that he’s the son-in-law of Troy coach Larry Blakeney.

At least he can’t be blamed this week for ranking the University of Idaho in his Top 25, as one of the remaining panelists did.

Yes, the Vandals. The same Vandals who have lost all four of their football games, who haven’t scored a touchdown in the last two weeks and whose opponents so far are 2-8 against teams that aren’t named Idaho.

It didn’t have to be just one voter. The Vandals totaled five points in the first Harris poll, so it could have been one guy ranking them 21st or two guys ranking them 23rd and 24th. But I’m thinking the odds of two guys being diagonally parked in parallel universes are just too great.

So, going on the single gunman theory, this voter decided that Idaho was not only better than three of the teams it lost to, but is also superior to 59 other teams that have actually, you know, won games – and even better than six teams that haven’t lost a game yet.

I ran this curiosity by Bob Burda, an assistant commissioner of the Big 12, which has the BCS dumped in its lap this season. He gave it the first-week-in-a-new- process-it’ll-work-itself-out ole.

“What we have no way of knowing is if it was inadvertent,” he said, “if someone meant to put on another team instead.”

Of course. Surely this was a typo, a miscommunication – a smudge on fax, or a slur in the speech, or wax in an operator’s ears when the voter said, oh, “Iowa.” So I called up the nice people at Harris and was granted an audience with a brave young woman named Renee Smith – Dr. Renee Smith, senior research scientist, who said her job was to “ensure the validity, reliability and accuracy of the results.”

Hmph. Betcha AP doesn’t have a doctor monitoring its poll.

“Harris is very pleased with the process and the way it went,” Smith said. “From all of our checks, the votes were recorded accurately.

“The particular ranking you’re referring to was confirmed by phone.”

One can only imagine.

Voter: “No. 21, Idaho.”

Poll taker: “Are you high?”

Or maybe not. There is no guarantee that the phone jockey compiling the votes at Harris knows if a football is stuffed or pumped, and for her impressive academic credentials there is not much evidence that Smith does, either.

“There will always be differences of opinion in college football,” she said. “In a survey like this, there is always the potential for diversity of thinking. The key thing is to focus on making sure that diversity doesn’t reflect a bias or a dramatic inconsistency. The person who submitted this ranking also submitted rankings that were consistent with the Top 25.

“It’s an opinion poll. There will be differences of opinion.”

Whoa, no, timeout, replay.

A difference of opinion is me ranking California 11th and you ranking it 20th. Or me still believing Michigan has Top 25 cred and you gleefully flushing them for losing to Notre Dame (13th) and Wisconsin (17th).

Idaho getting a vote – 21st, 25th or 95th – is, at the least, temporary insanity.

Or it’s somebody making a joke.

Or it’s a compassionate soul with some affection for Idaho’s staff who wants to give the Vandals a boost until times get better, which you figure it eventually has to for a hard-charger like coach Nick Holt and Idaho’s long-suffering fans.

Thanks for nothing. For Idaho, this is an unwanted embarrassment on the order of being shut out by Hawaii. It’s a bellyflop in the cowplop, too, for Harris and for the BCS – and it should be for the voter in question, except the Harris/BCS won’t release individual ballots until the final week “because that’s where the focus is,” Burda said. “Ultimately, the last week determines the final BCS standings.”

Until then, hey, anything goes. Next week, Electoral College ranked 15th.

By the way, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m back on the AP slate of voters this season. This week I have USC No. 1, Arizona State No. 12 and Idaho mathematically eliminated. And Saturday night after all the deadlines have passed, I’ll have one eye on SportsCenter and the other on the Internet trolling for results and reports of games I didn’t see or hear about earlier in the day – duty that severely cuts into refreshment time.

Hmm. On further review, maybe I’ll just vote for Idaho. Or Reader’s Digest.