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Nine-year-old Jenny is riding to the Wichita State basketball game with her father.
Jenny: Dad, are the Shockers any good?
Father thinks about this for a few seconds.
Father: Yes. Yes, they are good. They’ve won 19 games, for crying out loud.
Jenny: Are they great?
Father: (Trying to convince himself) Yeah. I mean, they’re not playing great. Not by a long shot. But they are nationally ranked. You have to be a great team to be nationally ranked.
Jenny: Oh.
Silence.
Jenny: What does that mean?
Father: That means they’re one of the top 25 teams in the country.
Jenny: How many teams are there?
Father: A lot. More than 300.
Jenny: And the Shockers are 25th?
Father: They’re 22nd in one of the polls, actually. But they had a really bad loss since those rankings came out. So they’re probably not going to be ranked at all next week.
Jenny: Wait - how many polls are there?
Father: Just two.
Jenny: Why two?
Father: Um … I don’t know. The journalists who cover the teams have a poll every week. And then the basketball coaches have their own poll.
Jenny: So every basketball coach and every journalist has to vote?
Father: No, only a few.
More silence.
Jenny: So they watch 300 teams and decide who is the best? Every week?
Father: Hey look – a Dairy Queen!
How the polls work
There are 31 head coaches at Division I coaches who vote every week in the USA Today/ESPN Coaches Poll, representing every conferences. (Baylor coach Scott Drew is responsible for voting on behalf of the Big 12 Conference; Northern Iowa’s Ben Jacobsen represents the Missouri Valley.)
These coaches are selected by the National Association of Basketball Coaches. NABC staff seeks replacements in a conference when necessary. Each coach is provided the reporting information and agrees to participate on a weekly basis, according to NABC Director of Public Relations Rick Leddy.
“We are confident that these coaches submit their own selections,” Leddy said. “That is not to say that the coach does not have a staff member physically send the ballot - but it is that coach's ballot.”
Each voter simply ranks his teams from No. 1 to No. 25. If a voter decides to make Kansas No. 1 on his poll, then the Jayhawks receive 25 points. If another voter decides Kansas is No. 2, then the Jayhawks receive 24 points, and so on.
The AP poll works in a similar way. There are 64 voters, who are either sportswriters or broadcasters. The number of voters in each state is determined by the number of major college teams in that state, so the geographic voting reflects the distribution of teams.
The state of Kansas is represented by only one voter, Lawrence Journal World sports editor Tom Keegan. Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and California all have three.
Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury News has been asked to vote in the AP poll every year for more than a decade. He always says yes, even though he said deciding his basketball poll takes about an hour each week. Football, for which he also votes, takes even longer.
“I reward teams for playing strong schedules, for collecting quality wins and even for quality losses,” Wilner said. “I'd rather the No. 20 team lose by three points to the No. 2 team than win by 20 over a cupcake.”
That’s been Wilner’s philosophy from the beginning. He said he pays no attention to how anyone else is voting.
“Nope. Never,” Wilner said. “I send in my ballot and rarely even look at the poll when it's released, much less the ballots of other voters.”What the polls mean
So do either of the college basketball polls have an actual purpose?
“Yeah,” said ESPN college basketball analyst Joe Lunardi. “They generate an incredible amount of negative email to me.”
Lunardi is the creator of “Bracketology,” a stunningly accurate system that tries to predict the NCAA Tournament field each March. And while Lunardi is kidding about the purpose of the AP and coaches rankings, he isn’t kidding about the complaints.
Some fans, Lunardi explains, may not understand how a team can be ranked as high as No. 6 in the nation but relegated to one of the bracket’s four eight seeds once the NCAA Tournament is announced. That was the case for George Washington University seven years ago.
Many fans focused their outrage on Lunardi. Keep in mind, Lunardi isn’t even part of the selection and seeding committee. He simply predicts what the committee will do. Nobody understands the system like he does.
“George Washington hadn’t played anybody that year,” Lunardi said. “Some fans tend to think, ‘If my team’s in the polls, we can’t be worse than a four seed.’ But that kind of thing happens on Selection Sunday all the time. The seeding has a lot to do with who you play and where you play.”
Gonzaga spent most of the 2001-02 season ranked in the top 10 of both polls, only to enter the NCAA Tournament as a six seed.
Lunardi said he will glance at the polls – at the top few teams, anyway – but doesn’t take much stock in them. He think it’s silly that if the top three teams all lose, for example, the No. 4 team automatically jumps to No. 1 – even if that team just squeaked out a nailbiter at home against Little Sisters of the Pitiful.
“Frankly, the polls aren’t particularly nimble,” Lunardi said. “They’re more formulaic. When you lose, that’s almost more important than who you lost to and how you’re playing. Teams should be leapfrogging each other all the time.”
Lunardi did say the AP poll “tends to be a little more thought out” than the coaches poll.
“That’s no disrespect to the coaches or coaching profession,” Lunardi said. “But let’s face it - 99 percent of the time, coaches are focused on their own team, they’re not paying attention to what’s going on in the Sun Belt Conference, or the Big Sky, or the WAC.
“Your poll ranking, once the postseason starts, doesn’t mean anything at all, anyway. Once the tournament starts, I don’t think at any point in time does CBS put a team’s ranking up on the screen. It goes by seed.”
So why do we have college basketball polls?
Because they give an order to things – for the fans, who would like to know where their team stacks up, and for the national media, which wants a barometer on who to keep track of.
“I do think being ranked is a big deal,” Lunardi said. “And the further you are from the Dukes and the Indianas and the Kansases of the world, the bigger of a deal it is. It’s bragging rights. It’s selling tickets and hats. It gives the whole institution a lift in things that have nothing to do with basketball.
“It’s human nature to want to be associated with a winner, whether it’s for a bake sale or in the national rankings for basketball. The bottom line is, it’s better than not being ranked.”