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This Sunday Texas Christian University passed Ball State in the Associated Press poll to place the Cardinals at No. 15 in the standings. They are only 20 or so points behind TCU and that’s ground that can still be made up easily.

Chris Fowler

But at least one AP voter is not going to make it easy for the Cardinals: Chris Fowler. For those of you who don’t know Fowler is the member of the ESPN/ABC booth who looks like Walter Peck from Ghostbusters. That or some kind of Muppet, I’m not sure.

Ball State, currently 15th in the AP poll, is missing the ten points that would come if Fowler, along with a few others would have Ball State reasonably ranked.

To prove how awful, statistically, Fowler is from the rest of the nation I put my AP Stats class to good use.

Of the 65 voters who placed a vote in the AP poll, 26 ranked Ball State No. 14, making it the mode. It is also the median because of the 13 voters who ranked Ball State 11th, 12th and 13th. The mean of the voters other than Fowler is 14.5. That means the Fowler is over ten points off, which is over four standard deviations away from the mean. If we eliminate the outliers who voted Ball State 24 and 25 the standard deviation shrinks, of course, and the math becomes more outlandish.

Walter Peck

More awful than that is Fowler’s list. He has a TCU team that barely beat an Air Force team that lost to Navy (a team Ball State defeated) as No. 12. Other teams on Fowler’s list, from No. 15 on: Oregon St. (8-3), Cincinnati (9-2), Mississippi (7-4), Oregon (8-3), Boston College (8-3), Georgia Tech (8-3), West Virginia (7-3), Florida St. (8-3), Michigan St. (9-3), Northwestern (9-3), BYU (10-2).

I could look at each one on this list and pick out problems. With the exception of a 7-4 SEC team and BYU, all these teams are from the Big East, the Pac 10, the ACC or the Big 10.

What do these conferences have in common? They all stink. Sure, they may not be as bad as the MAC (which is better than it gets credit for) but is going 9-3 against a conference that has Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan really that impressive? How about the PAC10, which has not only the worst (Washington), but also the second worst (Washington State) team in the country? How is Oregon’s best win against a 6-5 Arizona that much better than Ball State’s win over 6-4 Navy or 8-3 Central Michigan? The Big East beats up on Syracuse, Louisville and South Florida. The ACC doesn’t have one team with more than eight wins. The MAC has two.

Guy Smiley

While Ball State may not be the No. 14 team in the country, no one has been able to beat them. Central Michigan, a two time defending MAC Champion, was the only team to make it into a game in the fourth quarter, and they were at home.

It’s fine that Chris Fowler thinks Ball State is a joke. I think he’s a joke. But at this point it is hurting the Cards ranking. Fowler, along with his ESPN partner Craig James and Glenn Guilbeau from the Gannett Louisiana News Service are the three who have Ball State outside the top twenty. If they all had Ball State at 16, which would be statistically reasonable, then Ball State would be the No. 14 team in the country.

The AP has made the voting records public, so you can see how your favorite voters placed Ball State here.

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