Fennelly: Publicizing college football poll ballots a good thing

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

College football coaches, those sneaky rascals who next season won't even have the guts to make public their final votes in the USA Today coaches' poll, are being dragged into the sunlight like so many Draculas.

That brings us to enterprising SI.com writer Andy Staples, a former Tampa Tribune employee and one of the great bulldogs in our business. We're all proud of Andrew here at the home office for his skill and honesty, as well as his innate ability to know the best barbecue joints within 123 miles of wherever he happens to be standing.

Anyway, Staples decided that seeing as most of the 59 coaches who vote in the poll work for public institutions, their votes should be public record under various state statutes that serve the Freedom of Information Act. Staples made open-records requests to public universities for coaches' ballots. South Florida was the first school to respond. Bully for them. Shine a light.

So now you can go on the USF athletics Web site and see how Bulls coach Jim Leavitt voted in his preseason Top 25. OK, it's not the CIA torture files, but anything that cracks this secret society is a good thing.

Jungle Jim had the Bulls No. 18, a tad high if you ask me. I'm sure Leavitt would have tried to put season-opening opponent Wofford in his Top 25, but they're I-AA.

The point is that anything that brings ballots into focus is good for college football.

The American Football Coaches Association has never really seen it that way. Never mind that the coaches' poll goes one-third of the way toward determining who plays for the BCS national championship and in BCS bowls, with millions on the line.

It took California getting left out of the 2005 Rose Bowl because it mysteriously dropped in the final coaches' poll (Texas went instead) for the AFCA to grudgingly make final poll results public. But now the plan is for the ballots to again run silent, run deep beginning in 2010. Coaches will go back to being cowards.

Or maybe they won't.

If the coaches' poll is to have any integrity, it has to be made public to prove there are no travesties. It's amazing how sunshine makes honesty grow.

I bet most college coaches try and do a good job. But how would we know if they didn't?

Many coaches think their ballots should be private, Florida State's Bobby Bowden among them, though Bobby would probably skywrite his ballot if it meant getting those 14 wins back.

Then there's Steve Spurrier, who has warned that that secret ballots offer a chance at "some real hanky-panky." At SEC media days last month, Spurrier repeated that he wants the ballots public: "Pretty much whatever you do, whatever it is, you know, put your name on it."

Wednesday, Leavitt said, "I don't mind doing it if it's public ... Will we make it public in the future? We may or may not. We may do it by smoke signals."

So if you see smoke coming from the football offices, either the poll is done or they're burning the Sun Bowl game tape.

Openness is the only way to assure accountability in this absurd system. Another way would be to prohibit coaches from voting for their own team. Still another way would be: playoffs. Yeah, there's that.

By the way, Leavitt said his players were upset with him. They thought they should have been ranked higher. Let's hope there's never a players' poll.

We're talking big business here. We're talking about coaches enriched at every turn. Most of the enriching comes from money spent by fans. We have a right to know and coaches have an obligation to let us know or the BCS becomes even more of a joke, if such a thing is possible.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.