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AUROB
(167.78.3.232) on 12/10/2004 - 9:47 a.m. says: ( 8 views
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"Here you go. "
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The BCS is a mess, and as long as The Associated Press football poll is part of the problem, the Observer has cast its last vote.
Mack Brown's Texas Longhorns were on the verge of being left out, and he wasn't happy. He said as much on television after a Thanksgiving beating of Texas A&M, lobbying voters on national television to move his team ahead of other teams he called "less deserving."
Texas fans took it from there. They bombarded AP voters, including the Observer's Ken Tysiac, with e-mails imploring them to change their votes. Some were eloquent, many were insulting. Tysiac didn't change, but others did.
One Alabama voter, also a victim of the e-mail bombardment, moved the Longhorns from ninth to fifth -- still behind Cal on his ballot, but a gain of four precious poll points. The L.A. Times reported voters from three Texas papers -- Dallas, Fort Worth and Austin -- flip-flopped the Longhorns and the Bears.
In the end, Texas moved up in the Bowl Championship Series standings, on the strength of its movement in the AP poll and a slight improvement in the computer rankings. The difference in payouts? The Rose, where Texas will play, pays $7 million to $8.5 million per team. The Holiday, where Cal was relegated, pays $1 million per team.
With that kind of money at stake, the potential for abuse is great, and even though Tysiac's top seven teams stayed the same before and after lobbying by Brown and Texas fans -- and the Observer published his votes each week all season for the sake of accountability -- the mess calls the polling process into question.
The credibility of this newspaper is more important than the prestige of voting in the AP poll. Tysiac will complete this season, the last in which a reporter from the Observer will vote in a poll tied to the BCS.
The AP basketball poll? We don't have a vote this season, but we would consider voting in the future. That poll is for fun and to drive fan interest, and it's basically meaningless because the NCAA basketball champion is determined in a playoff.
Hey, now there's an idea ...
Bobcats coverage
You might have noticed a difference in our coverage of the NBA expansion Charlotte Bobcats. Staff writers Rick Bonnell and David Scott, the two main reporters for the team, are doing more analysis and less play-by-play, to give you more of the why and less of the what.
In the era of ESPNews,"SportsCenter" practically on demand, and the Internet, readers can get results. What you can't get anywhere else is the expertise of veteran reporters who are with the team all the time.
More analytical game stories, our Bobcats "Observations" and an insider approach, we hope, will set our coverage apart.
Let me know what you think.
Note
• One of the focuses for the sports section -- and the newspaper -- this year has been storytelling, writing about people doing stuff in a way that puts you there and makes you care. Wednesday's story by Langston Wertz Jr., about Concord quarterback Tommy Beecher and the final five minutes of the Spiders' state semifinal football win was a good example. If you know of a great story, let me know. Perhaps we'll tell it in the newspaper.
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