Encouraging Signs

Just a bit of a follow-up here on the BCS/Associated Press poll discussion below (sorry, folks, but until Steve gets off his ass healthy, you’re stuck with me and my college football obsessions).

Since last week’s final polls and the ensuing hullabaloos, there’ve been some encouraging signs regarding the future of the college football polls. One paper, the Charlotte Observer, has announced that it is resigning from the AP writer’s poll:

The credibility of this newspaper is more important than the prestige of voting in the AP poll. [Observer writer Ken] 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.

Now that’s a responsible, and long-overdue decision. While no other papers have followed the Observer’s lead to date, a growing number of sports writers have noted their own discomfort with the conflicted and arbitrary nature of the media polls: Carey Estes of the Birmingham Post-Herald (scroll down) notes,

For the past few weeks, many members of the media