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In the BCS, An Eclectic Electorate
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Lawless, who is retired, said he might not vote next year because he said he spent 20 hours a week contemplating his ballot.
All of the study led Lawless, the lone pollster without a direct correlation to college football, to a peculiar conclusion: He had Ohio State, Michigan and Wisconsin as his top three teams, which made him the only voter to rank the Badgers No. 3.
"I would say over the years, [Big Ten Commissioner] Jim Delaney and I had enough battles that I would never, if I had any bias in me, then I wouldn't vote the top three out of the Big Ten," Lawless said. "But that's the way it came out."
Harris Interactive takes an active approach in voter turnover, using what Quilty called "panel management." By either voters leaving or voters being removed, it tries to replace 10 to 40 percent of the voters after each season.
Voters are selected from a pool of candidates recommended by conference officials. Each conference sent a list of 30 candidates to Harris Interactive, which then randomly selected 10 of those. A handful of recommendations from independent teams also are randomly sifted and chosen, leading to a total of 114 voters.
The process resulted in some interesting panelists, to be sure. Whether or not they are the 114 people best suited to choose the national championship can be debated, like anything else in college football.
"That's subjective, really subjective," Quilty said. "I'm not sure how we would define who the best 114 voters are. It's like asking who the second-best football team out there is."
Staff writer Eric Prisbell contributed to this report.
