Your 2009 Preseason Coaches' Poll
by Year2 on Aug 7, 2009 8:04 AM EDT
in SEC Football
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PrintThe 2009 preseason Coaches' Poll is out, and at least at the top, there's no surprises:
- Florida (53 first place votes), 1,466 points
- Texas (4), 1,386
- Oklahoma (1), 1,358
- USC (1), 1,321
- Alabama, 1,134
There's the Big Four at the top, a big gap, and everyone else. We knew this was coming. Florida is not a unanimous No. 1, which is actually not all that big a surprise either. Given the dissent at the end of last year, plus the returns of Sam Bradford and Colt McCoy, there was bound to be a couple people who disagreed with putting the Gators at the top.
However, at least one person has Florida below No. 2 on his ballot since the Gators would have 1,469 points if they were second on every ballot they didn't get the first place vote on. My guess is that a couple of Big 12 coaches have some combination of Texas and Oklahoma in the top two spots since we've seen in the public final ballots in the past that regional voting is rampant in the poll.
All of the top eight won at least ten games last year. The highest non-Big Six team is Boise State at No. 16, followed immediately by TCU and Utah in that order.
The rest of the SEC teams are as follows:
9. LSU, 917
10. Ole Miss, 889
13. Georgia, 707
37. South Carolina, 18
39. Auburn, 12
42. Kentucky, 9
44. Arkansas, 6
56. Tennessee, 2
As often happens in the preseason poll, a ton of teams received votes. This year, a full half (60) of all I-A teams got at least one vote, which explains why I can report to you that the Vols ended up at No. 56.
It appears at least among coaches that the faith in Tennessee's rebound that is so pervasive among most preseason publications is not there. They also have a lot more faith in South Carolina than the current preseason consensus does, given that only one publication has the Gamecocks third in the East, and that same one (Sporting News) is the only that has them above Tennessee.
I'm also kind of shocked that Auburn and Kentucky made it above Arkansas, but when you're talking that low on the also receiving votes list, there's really not that much difference.
I still think the Coaches' Poll has no place in the BCS since coaches seldom do the actual voting and have no time to watch games even if they did. It's a giant conflict of interest when their votes can affect their salaries (as most have bonuses tied into going to certain bowl games and/or poll placement).
However, since it is unfortunately part of the system that determines the champion, here it is. Let the dissection begin.
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Did you forget last year?
First time I shot her, I shot her in the side.
Hard to watch her suffer, but with the second shot she died...
Or this from 07
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw3xRoLk5d0
First time I shot her, I shot her in the side.
Hard to watch her suffer, but with the second shot she died...
writers have already broken the "witch hunt" barrier...
why doesn’t some intrepid reporter (or group of reporters) take the time to ask most or all of the coaches with a ballot whether they actually fill it out each week? i mean, we constantly read claims that the coaches don’t fill them out, but other than a few anecdotal sources, i haven’t heard any real proof in either direction about it.
and “but spurrier didn’t fill out his own all-sec team ballot” doesn’t count, because the preseason team and the national poll are two totally different animals. i still can’t believe that extrapolation grew legs last week.
and besides, i’m not so sure it’s a bad thing that coaches aren’t the ones voting. they don’t have the luxury of following the sport as a whole. maybe their voting surrogate does?
On a recent ESPN college football podcast, Beano Cook mentioned that he filled out his coach’s ballots while he was working as SID at Pitt in the ‘70s. About every four weeks, the coach would glance at it and move a couple of teams around, but that was it until the final one. The coach always did that for himself. He talked to a lot of other SIDs at the time, and they all said the Coaches’ Poll ballots worked that way.
I’d bet that it still works goes like that today. There often are weird things that happen between the penultimate and the last polls of the regular season (2007 being the most obvious example), so a process like Cook described would account for weird swings like that.
Team Speed Kills
SBNation's SEC Blog
If the upper halves of the MWC and WAC combined, they’d form a very solid #6 conference – and probably an entertaining one, too, with four teams between 16 and 24. As for the Big East… voof. Does anyone else remember the days when the conference boasted multiple heavyweight matchups with national title implications? That did happen, right?!?
Thinking about the Big East having multiple national title contenders is the easiest way to make 2006 feel like a looooong time ago.
Team Speed Kills
SBNation's SEC Blog
It’s reassuring to know that I didn’t imagine undefeated #15 Rutgers knocking off undefeated #3 Louisville, or #8 West Virginia giving #7 Rutgers its first loss a few weeks later. (I did have to look up the rankings, mind you – my memory of Big East seasons past isn’t that good.)
All three of the games in the Big East’s round-robin that year were entertaining, though UL-WVU could have been billed as ‘WACky in the Bluegrass-y’…
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