Championship game is good, right?

gnats67

gnats67

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Dec 3, 2001
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An article in today's fishwrapper about the ACC's planned move to have the minimum for a championship game changed from 12 to 10 teams generated a poll that indicates indifference towards the game. Can this be right or has the poll been hijacked? I thought it was totally a good thing.

-link to poll-

edit 7/13, 8:00PM - the poll has rebounded by some 6000 votes.
 
That poll looks to be angrily sabotaged by pissed off SEC fans who forsee the power shifting to what used to be a lesser conference.

Read nothing into it.
 
I agree as well.. if the NCAA decides not to allow conferences with less than 12 teams participate in a conference championship game, it will only lead to more "conference raiding".. by agreeing to allow conferences with less than 12 participate, it will mean a little more stability for existing conferences..

In my opinion, the championship game would be great for the ACC.. and if we could do it with the existing 11 teams.. we should continue to be the most efficiently managed conferece.. ie. higher payouts per team..
 
Gnats is right. There's definitely something screwy going on.

Earlier in the day, I noticed that the poll didn't require a unique IP address in order to vote, so you could vote basically an unlimited number of times. Any professional company would realize this and log IP's and require new ones for each vote. The AJC most likely deliberately allows this multiple voting so that it will appear to have a larger audience.

The first time I went, there was I think 3,000-something total votes, and 90-something% votes were for the "Do away with them all" option. Later on in the day I went back and noticed that the poll had balanced out and gotten more realistic numbers. When I voted for "11 teams," the points for "10 teams" jumped up by 30 votes. During about the same 15 or so seconds I took to decide which to vote for. Hmm. I think I tried voting for "12 teams" next, and after I submitted the votes for "10 teams" had jumped by exactly 20 votes. All others remained the same. I'm not exactly sure what was going on, but I took some screenshots while I was voting. After a while, the number of votes that counted for each vote submitted was actually one, so I stopped. I probably voted a total of around a dozen times during this process.

I think that this is just a fraud, and not as many people visit the AJC web site as the AJC would have everyone believe. I especially don't think that anyone really cares enough to hack the AJC web site over a poll. Maybe someone did hack the site, but probably either AJC doctored its poll to weight a few votes more than they should have counted or someone was doctoring the numbers at the same time I was voting.

I would've posted this earlier, but I hadn't been approved to post here yet. Anyways, my point is that at least the Internet arm of the AJC is unprofessional and you shouldn't pay too much attention to its polls. At any rate, they should have either secured its web server(s) against having its poll hacked or not rigged it themselves. My guess is that much less than 1,000 people actually voted in this poll.

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Thanks, ahsoisee. I had to lurk here a little while 'cause the first time I tried signing up under a non-GT e-mail address and my application got rejected.
grin.gif
 
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