Your new, improved Mumme Poll, now with more approval voting!

The Coaches Poll has been reduced to an irrelevancy, but the Mumme Poll abides.  That’s right, the brainchild of Get The Picture and the late, lamented 3^rd Saturday in Blogtober is back for another season.  (It’s eighth, I believe.)

Tidefan and I have made some changes, though.  Not in the basic concept, which is to offer a platform for a fan-based approach to ranking college football’s best teams with a process that is easier and less biased than the traditional way of doing so, as shown by what the coaches do, but in the way we’ll go about casting our ballots in 2015.

No longer will you be asked to fill a ballot of a predetermined size.  Instead, we’ll leave it up to you do decide how many teams you think are worthy of consideration, based on your own personal criteria.  You think there’s only one team deserving of recognition?  Fine.  Want to stick to picking a four-team field for the semi-finals as the proper way to define the best?  Works for us.  You consider yourself a forward thinking person who would rather move ahead to the day when the postseason field is your perfect eight schools?  Go, dog, go.  Or do anything in between – I will, as I’ll test my theory that, at most, there are never more than four or five teams in a given season worthy of national title consideration.

It all works.  We’re counting total approvals to rank teams, and that’s all we’ll do.  (Click on the link on the Mumme Poll page if you want to learn more about how approval voting functions.)

This should make it even less time-consuming to construct a ballot, at least if your experience is like mine, spending the bulk of my time deciding which school gets the last slot, usually because as the season progresses, it’s impossible to find a team worthy of making the list.

The other changes are minor.  Tidefan, who is the brains of this operation, by the way, has removed the comments section at the site, as it was getting little use.  All commenting on ballots will be here.  I’ll try to make sure we have a few posts every week for that.  Also, we’re ditching attendance requirements.  If you miss, you can play again.  And you can register to vote when you’d like.

Rules?  Ah, rules.  There aren’t many left now.

1. Registration. To cast a ballot, you’ll need to register at the Mumme Poll site.
2. Voting period. In most weeks, balloting takes place at any time between 9:00 A.M. on the Sunday after the games and 9:00 P.M. on the following Monday.  On those rare weeks when a Sunday game is played, the voting is pushed back 24 hours.
3. The one commandment. Don’t try to game the system. Don’t subvert the vote by submitting a ballot with your favorite school and the nine worst teams in D-1, for example.  The ballots are monitored and if something questionable comes up, a voter will be given a chance to explain.  If we’re convinced there’s a deliberate effort to muck things up, we’ll toss the ballot and the voter.

As far as registration goes, if you voted before, you should still be in the system and don’t need to register again.  See?  Easy.

First ballot casting will take place starting next Sunday morning.

Any feedback, questions or complaints feel free to bring up in the comments section.

Please vote.  Tell your friends who are football fans to jump in, too.  The more, the merrier, particularly if we’re able to broaden the geographics of our voting pool.

Besides, if you’re a Georgia fan, you could probably use a distraction right now.