By: Doug Lesmerises (Cleveland Plain Dealer) –
The American Football Coaches Association recently looked to outside help to evaluate the way the coaches conduct their share of the BCS system.

Is the weekly coaches poll, which constitutes one-third of the BCS standings, done the best way possible?

So what is one of the primary suggestions that the coaches will accept from Gallup, the polling organization that conducted the overview of the system?

More secrecy.

The coaches will be selected randomly now, and there are some things in the news release today about the way figures will be rounded to determine how many voters each conference gets. In the end, there will be 59 coaches in the poll this fall instead of the 63 from a year ago, and familiar names like Jim Tressel and other veteran coaches may not be chosen in the random process.

Grant Teaff, the president of the AFCA, is a veteran coach and straight shooter who obviously agrees with the new suggestions. He said the AFCA is just listening to the experts, and the experts say make the ballots private.

Later today, I’ll post notes from the conversation I just had with Teaff.

But my first reaction is that the real issue with the coaches poll, at least to me, has not been how coaches are chosen or which coaches are chosen, but how any of those coaches vote.

* Whether they move teams up and down each week in a way that makes sense related to results on the field.

* Whether they do it themselves or have staffers handle the ballots.

* Whether they are biased for or against teams in their conference and/or other coaches they like or dislike.

And how do you check on that?

With transparency. By releasing the ballots every week, not just in the final week of the balloting.

So what does Gallup suggest? Not releasing the ballots at all. Not even the year-end ballots, which is how it has been done for the last four years.

The AFCA says that suggestion won’t be implemented until 2010. There is another suggestion to be studied about using an online method to review the votes, decreasing the time that USA Today, which oversees the poll, has to review the votes. And that supposedly would lead to better accuracy by the voters.

But nothing encourages accuracy – and thought and honesty and removal of bias – like having every vote out there every week for the whole world to see.

That’s how it works with my Associated Press ballot, even though the AP isn’t part of the BCS.

I hoped this review would lead to that conclusion. Instead, it seems like we’ll know less about the votes – which directly affect those coaches, their players, their fans and their programs – than we did before.