POLLING ERRORS
If you're in line, stay in line. You can still vote for Kennesaw State to make a bowl game.
CUSA followed the Big 12’s lead this summer in replacing the traditional media poll with something called the Bowl Confidence Index. The league also continued its weird alternative to the preseason all-conference team, opting instead for a 60-man Watch List featuring five guys per team, no matter what. A complete abomination with six QBs and only two WRs total. Disgusting stuff all around.
Before we go any further: Please pause and pay respects to Nebraska Furniture Mart, the Official Furniture and Décor Provider of the 2025 CUSA Football Kickoff and Media Day. Tuesday can’t get here fast enough - just think about how “professional and visually impactful” the studio space will look.
Talkin’ Season is a welcome sight on the horizon, even if we have to put up with some of the related absurdities. Will we actually learn anything at media day? Probably not, but seeing Jerry Mack, Christian Moss, and JeRico Washington share a stylish and comfortable sectional means that we’re knocking on the door of football season.
HootCorp’s massive staff will try to send out a preview of media day storylines in the next few days. For now, we’re focused on the prestigious, legitimate Bowl Confidence Index. Let CUSA explain the updated “poll” format:
The Bowl Confidence Index introduces a new approach to our preseason football coverage. Rather than ranking teams from one through twelve, voters will now select the teams they believe will qualify for a bowl game. This fresh format avoids some of the challenges that came with the traditional media poll, such as roster turnover and new members adjusting to the league. It also complements our existing preseason individual awards and offers fans a broader look at teams with postseason potential.
The league’s assistant commissioner for communications weighed in on Twitter, too: “Voting on a preseason poll would’ve been more difficult than it had ever been.” Lost in translation here: By grading pass/fail on bowl eligibility and not conference finish, CUSA is in effect asking voters - if they’re really thinking it through - to pay attention to the entirety of FBS because it’s too much work to keep up with our 12 teams.
Even if I dunno, it’s hard to pick is a laughable reason for the change, you have to admit that part’s true at least. Half of CUSA either hired a fresh face to lead them or joins the league for the first time. Those who didn’t change coaches or conferences still saw the requisite roster movement of a modern G5 team anyway — quarterbacks who didn’t want to be here all along, success stories moving on, departing coordinators raiding rosters, etc.
Depending on where you look, Liberty’s CUSA title odds (+125 or so) outweigh the likelihood of bowl eligibility for the bottom five programs. WKU’s the only other team Vegas thinks even has a 20% chance of winning the league. The BCI idea feels like a way to make every other above-average team look more viable in a top-heavy conference. You can look at it as CUSA hedging its bets instead of forcing a Liberty vs. the field verdict in the court of public opinion.
How’d the voters do? You can judge for yourself.
Oh, guess it’s still just an all-chalk list of CUSA teams in order by how good the voters think they’ll be. Fair enough. I’ll roll up my sleeves and stand in front of the Big Board like Steve Kornacki for the raw vote counts. Sadly, we have no precinct level data as to which voters went which direction.
Liberty - 24/24
WKU - 24/24
JSU - 22/24
LA Tech - 18/24
Sam Houston - 11/24
UTEP - 10/24
FIU - 9/24
Delaware - 7/24
New Mexico State - 6/24
MTSU - 6/24
Kennesaw State - 4/24
Missouri State - 3/24
In theory, I can understand the intention of trying something different in a conference with one over-funded heavyweight and this much turnover year-to-year. Projecting a clear-cut finishing order doesn’t allow for much nuance between clusters. This is our best team, these guys are in second-place, and so on down the line. If a team finds itself buried down the rankings based on uncertainty, good luck climbing out of that hole, at least in terms of perception.
What we ended up getting on Friday was the worst of both worlds, though. These BCI rankings still stratify the teams just as much as before, but they tell us even less about the teams and bring literally zero statistical value. You can’t even really argue about the results, which is the one aspect of preseason polls with a high approval rating.
Part of the problem lies in doing a simple thumbs up or thumbs down vote for every team, with only a miniature sample size to rely upon. That feeds on the worst instincts of a press corps that doesn’t know much about their own teams yet, much less the other 11. If you must do “Bowl Confidence” as a level-setting preseason metric, at least make the media put down a percentage for each team instead of handing them an all-or-nothing binary ballot. That way you could see a range of opinions develop, a better option than distinct preseason class system created here.
BCI turned out more like a proposal from someone who graduated from one of Canada’s top business sports management schools with really good grades.
We don’t want people to think about our teams in simple, archaic terms like Good or Bad. The plan? Ask 24 people to rank them as Good or Bad.
Take a look at this comparison between the BCI (lmao, I can’t believe we have to take this “stat” seriously) vs. a selection of industry power rankings and the implied probability to win 6 or more games at DraftKings. CUSA’s top four teams are all overrated by the media pool based on betting odds, and the bottom half got massively undervalued in response.
Do these BCI probabilities make much any sense in the real world? Do you really have to ask? Bowl Confidence Index results imply that 6 teams will make the postseason, after the league office sent out a sample ranking referencing an average of 7 selections per voter. Unless CUSA’s middle class teams absolutely crush relatively difficult OOC schedules, that feels like a tough ask. For an example of how the math doesn’t add up, I’m struggling to find a justification for a stat that presents Louisiana Tech as 3x more likely to reach the postseason than MTSU. My DMs are also wide open if anyone can explain the logic of Sam Houston, a team without a home stadium who’s likely to go 0-4 in the non-conference, tripling up Kennesaw’s probability.
Using FPI’s projections: Excluding Liberty, the entire league ranks outside the top 100, all rated within 8.2 points. If the purpose of this preseason exercise was to make the league look more competitive, CUSA ended up putting out a poll that actually does a worse job highlighting a wide-open race for bowl eligibility.
All that said, I would like to shake the hands of the four voters who bravely stood up and predicted the Owls would make a bowl game. You know ball, and should be celebrated as a hero. Thank you for your service.