Badgers' Complete Poll Removal 'Methodologically Questionable,' Says Krueger

WAUKESHA — The Wisconsin Badgers lost to UCLA on Saturday and by Sunday morning had vanished entirely from the Associated Press Top 25, not dropped a few spots, not docked for style points, just gone, while UCLA and USC both climbed. I have read the poll results four times now at my kitchen table on Dunbar Court, and I remain unconvinced anyone involved can explain their math.

I spent 29 years with the Waukesha Department of Public Works, most of it filing incident reports that got kicked back by my supervisor for insufficient documentation. A pothole doesn't get patched because a guy feels like it's bad. It gets patched because a work order lists depth, width, and traffic volume. The AP poll, as far as I can tell, has no comparable work order. Fifty-some voters rank 25 teams off vibes and television highlights, and a team with a winning conference record can disappear from the list like it never existed.

The numbers, such as they are

I pulled Wisconsin's full schedule off my phone and wrote the scores on the back of a Piggly Wiggly receipt, which is still the most reliable surface in my house for this kind of work. The Badgers are 6-2. Six and two is not a record that disappears a team from 25 spots. Six and two is a record that, in any system with actual rules, gets a team a phone call before a vote, not an unranked Monday morning.

"Nobody from the poll has ever called me, and I'd answer. I've got the landline on at all hours."

— Bob Krueger, opinion contributor

I'm not saying I deserve a call. I'm saying someone's conference record deserves one. I went looking for the actual poll bylaws, if there are any, and found a page that says ballots are due by a certain hour and that's about it. No rubric. No minimum games under review. No form. At the DPW, if you wanted to decommission a stop sign, you filled out a Form 14-B and waited six weeks for a traffic study. Wisconsin lost one road game and got decommissioned from a top-25 list in under 18 hours.

A modest proposal

Here is what I would do, and I say this as a man who once wrote a three-page memo about a cracked slab on Springdale Road that nobody read. Any voter who wants to drop a team entirely, not down three spots, entirely, out of the rankings, should have to submit a one-page written justification. Doesn't need to be long. Doesn't need footnotes. Just something more than 'I watched the fourth quarter and got a feeling.' If USC and UCLA are good enough to jump ahead, fine, show the work. Show me the yards per play. Show me the turnover margin. I will read it at my kitchen table same as I read everything else, and if the numbers hold up, I will say so in this column, because I'm not a homer, I'm a guy with a receipt full of math.

My wife Carol thinks I'm taking this too seriously for a Tuesday. I told her the same thing I told my supervisor in 2019 when he asked why I'd measured a sinkhole on Arcadian Avenue to the quarter inch: it's not about the sinkhole, it's about whether anybody can trust the number next to the sinkhole.

What happens next

Wisconsin plays two winnable games before the next real reckoning, and if they take both, I expect the Badgers back in the rankings, assuming the voters are even looking at a spreadsheet and not just the highlight reel. I'll be watching both games from my recliner with the receipt nearby, in case I need to update the math. If the Badgers get back in and nobody issues so much as a corrected memo explaining the first decision, I want that noted plainly: the system worked by accident, not by design.

I called this same kind of thing a civic feature once, not a bug, when I wrote about downtown parking. I'm less charitable here. A parking shortage at least has a known cause. This poll does not, and until somebody shows me a form, I'm filing this one under unresolved.