Web Site Brings Vox Populi to College Football Polling
By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI
The final college football polls will be released Tuesday. One will be posted at fanspoll.com, a Web site where fans, not sportswriters or coaches, choose their national champion.
“The fans are the ones who are buying the expensive tickets and the caps and the sweatshirts and the hot dogs and helping to pay the huge salaries that some of the big-time college coaches are earning,” George Brown, a 20-year-old junior at Auburn University, said. “So if anyone should have a say in who No. 1 is, it should be us.”
Brown was a senior at Opelika High School in Alabama in late 2004 when he and his father, Randy, created fanspoll.com, college football’s Web version of the People’s Choice Awards. The Auburn Tigers, their favorite team, had a 12-0 record, but Southern California and Oklahoma did, too, and they went on to meet in the title game.
“Being from a small town in Alabama, I was raised on Auburn football and grew to love the team,” Brown said. “Auburn is the kind of place where a perfect season doesn’t come around very often, so I really felt cheated that year. We were the little guy that nobody wanted to see in the big game, and when we got left out, my dad and I, like most Auburn fans, got very angry, and we were determined to do something about it.”
He and his father founded the Web site before the 2004-5 bowl season, when five teams were unbeaten. Fans cast their votes only for the national champion; Auburn, which defeated Virginia Tech in the Sugar Bowl, came out on top. U.S.C. was No. 1 in the Associated Press poll, with Auburn No. 2.
Fanspoll.com’s road to choosing a national champion has remained the same since 2005, the site’s second year. The free Web site, which lists 120 teams eligible for championship consideration, has a weekly top 25 poll that Brown said “works like the electoral college.” This season, 6,100 fans registered, and each selected a favorite team. (Randy Brown said last week that the site was experiencing technical problems in some areas.)
In addition to voting on the top teams each week, fans predict the winners of 10 specified games. The 120 fans who compile the best records, one representing each of the eligible teams, are named to a selection committee.
They vote for the national champion, as well as 19 other national awards, including quarterback of the year and coach of the year. For the past two years, fanspoll.com and the A.P. poll have chosen the same No. 1 team.
“The fans who finished with the best records are likely to be the most qualified committee members,” Randy Brown said. “The coaches love it because they know that the voting is being done by a very intelligent group of football fans. To me, this is the same concept that has made ‘American Idol’ a great television show. On ‘Idol,’ it’s the fans who vote for the best singer, not the judges or anyone else in the music industry. It’s the same here; just substitute football for music.”
Ed Manetta, a former athletic director at St. John’s who is now a partner in MSL Sports, an intellectual-property-development company in New York that is helping to expand fanspoll.com’s user base, said, “This poll is something that colleges and universities can really run with.”
“For a college football team to say that it was chosen No. 1 by fans is a huge thing,” he added. “It’s an extremely positive statement, one made on a national level, and a school can really get a lot of mileage out of it.”
No one has gotten more mileage out of it than George Brown, who handed the fanspoll.com National Championship trophy to Auburn Coach Tommy Tuberville for 2004 and to Florida Coach Urban Meyer for 2006. A scheduling conflict forced him to send the 2005 trophy to Mack Brown at Texas.
“Coach Tuberville was very flattered and very accepting when I handed him the trophy,” George Brown said. “Auburn fans know that it should not have been the only championship trophy he received that year.”
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