Teams of FCS, Unite!

Bowing to the wishes of the proletariat and their liberal intelligentsia supporters in the media, the Associated Press has decided that, yes, I-AA Football Championship Subdivision teams are eligible for the organization's weekly college football poll.

Yes,I would like to call in my poll for this week.

Several AP voters expressed interest in putting Appalachian State on their ballots after a shocking 34-32 upset at then-No. 5 Michigan last weekend. But the poll guidelines, which mirrored the coaches' rankings conducted by USA Today, limited eligibility to teams competing in the former NCAA Division I-A, now known as the Football Bowl Subdivision. ...
"Why not? The poll was always intended to measure teams that compete against each other, regardless of division, based solely on on-field performance," she said. "It was that way long before Division I was divided into I-A and I-AA in 1978."
One poll voter, Adam Van Brimmer, said he wanted to put Appalachian State at No. 25 after their win over the Wolverines, largely as a symbolic gesture. He might still do it next week, assuming the Mountaineers beat Division II Lenoir-Rhyne.
"If I have any openings in my poll, they would certainly be strongly considered," said Van Brimmer, who works for the Georgia-based Morris News Service.
In a previous job, he covered longtime Division I-AA powerhouse Georgia Southern, which, like Appalachian State, is a member of the Southern Conference.
"Having spent so much time watching those Georgia Southern teams, I'm sure the top teams in the Southern Conference are as good as any mid majors," Van Brimmer said. "They're probably as good as anybody in the MAC (Mid-American Conference). They're probably better than most in the Sun Belt."

This, of course, could open all kinds of issues if USA TODAY, which is currently continuing the Division I-AA FCS boycott, were to allow the lower-class citizens in. What if one of them went on a tear? Could they end up in the BCS rankings? Then what?

This is, of course, a hypothetical that almost certainly wouldn't pan out -- how many Division I-A Football Bowl Subdivision teams would a sane FCS AD schedule? But if you had gone around two weeks ago telling people Appalachian State was going to beat Michigan in the Big House, you would have been institutionalized. And you would have deserved it.

Now, there comes this question of the BlogPoll: Will we allow FCS teams in? I, for one, would be opposed to this, since it would undermine the whole "We watch more games than the media pollsters" argument. If you add FCS teams, we'd be either excluding or including them more on gut feeling or a good win or two than on an actual examination of how they play, since there are very few that are consistently on television.

But I think it's a fair topic for discussion.

Of course, in the end it would be up to Brian, whom I'm guessing would be disinclined. Again, just a guess there.