Last week, the latest attempt to salvage college football from the clutches of the Bowl Championship Series was unveiled.

The Harris Interactive College Football Poll made its official debut, replacing the Associated Press poll that the organization ordered the BCS to stop using after last season’s national title debacle.

The Harris poll is a 114-member panel composed of former players, coaches and current and former media that vote for the top 25 college football teams each week. The goal was to create a panel of college football experts to accurately rank the top 25 teams and help put an end to the controversy that lingers at the end of every season.

I know the BCS has enough problems to deal with as it is, but I am going to have to call the new poll’s credibility into question.

For starters, the poll already had to dismiss several members over the summer, including Jason Rash. Rash was dismissed from the panel after it was discovered that his only connection to college football was being the son-in-law of Larry Blakeney, head coach at Troy University. I’m glad to see the poll organizers took the time to make sure its members were qualified.

I was willing to overlook the problems the poll had in the beginning as long as the rankings were credible. Unfortunately, the BCS let me down again.

Fresh off a 61-14 home loss against Michigan State, Illinois managed to receive 13 top-25 votes when the first poll was released last week. I don’t know everyone that submits votes, but unless Ron Zook gets to vote 13 times the Illini got 13 votes too many. A 1-2 Arizona squad was also deemed worthy of 10 top-25 votes. Apparently beating Northern Arizona brings national respect.

I began to question the poll after I saw that the above mentioned teams received votes, but nothing could have prepared me for what I saw while looking through the section of others receiving votes. A 0-4 Idaho received five top-25 votes. Five different members of what is supposed to be a panel of the best minds in college football gave a winless team a top-25 vote. BCS representatives offered two explanations that didn’t exactly ease my concerns.

Perhaps the voters wanted to vote for Boise State and accidently voted for Idaho instead. After all, both teams are from Idaho, and who would have thought the state of Idaho would have more than one team?

Or maybe the voters called in their votes, and the person on the other end thought they said Iowa. That excuse might work when someone at McDonald’s gets a drive-through order wrong, but these votes will help determine which schools play in BCS games and have millions of dollars riding on them.

The Harris poll is clearly not the answer to the BCS’s problems, but to be fair nothing is going to fix the BCS. It is inevitable that the BCS will fail to have the two best teams play for the national title unless two – and only two – major conference teams go undefeated.

Every year the BCS formula is altered to try to correct a problem from the previous season and every year a new problem comes up. The Harris poll is the latest in a string of remedies intended to fix a BCS system that is inherently flawed. There are certain things in sports that just can’t be measured by mathematical formulas.

Imagine if there had been three undefeated teams during the 2002 season. Ohio State would have suffered the same fate as Auburn last year because they were a defensive-minded team that didn’t run up the score every game.

The BCS has had seven years to try to perfect a formula, and it hasn’t even come close.

Until the BCS is dismantled once and for all, college football fans will continue to enjoy classic national title games like Miami’s 37-14 laugher over Nebraska or USC’s 55-19 destruction of Oklahoma.

Brian Polking is a junior in journalism. He hates the BCS, instant replay and any other innovations that ruin the purity of sports. He can be reached at [email protected].