Meet The Voters of the Harris Poll!

One column idea that I have wanted to tackle is looking at the voters of the Harris poll. I decided the time has finally arrived to figure out what it takes to be a Harris Poll voter (even though its April), so I can feel better about it when I make fun of the voters next college football season.

Here are the qualifications to be a Harris Poll voter:
“Panelists have been randomly selected from among more than 300 nominations submitted by the conference offices and the independent institutions. The panel has been designed to be a statistically valid representation of all 11 Division I-A conferences and institutions participating in the Bowl Championship Series.”

So basically, we've shockingly learned that it’s not what you know, its who you know. Luckily, they supposedly take nominations from all the conferences, so there’s still hope that I could one day be a Harris Poll voter. I realize most of the readers on the blog did not go to a Division I football school, but don’t give up hope, because Tom Hammond gets to vote and I think he’s just a broadcaster on NBC.

Amazingly, even better than how the Harris Poll voters are selected, they actually provide a list of each of the voters. I'd recommend checking out the list to see some of the names you might recognize.

One thing jumps out on this list to me– the lack of women. How are the females so underrepresented? I only could find two out of the hundreds listed that I think are women (unless they are men w/ female names), and neither of them are Kathy Ireland, who played a kicker in the movie “Necessary Roughness.” Another thing jumps out, which is the amount of white Running Backs. “Touchdown” Tommy Vardell AND Brad Muster are on the list! I’m sure there are other white RBs, but those are the names that jump out to me on the list. I sincerely think that Craig James and Johnny Johnson, the only other white RBs I can think of off the top of my head, should be selected to serve as voters for the 2007 Harris Poll voters.

Also, I have no idea why Boomer Esiason is helping to decide the college championship game each season.