Ariz. There is every chance that several schools will spend New Year's screaming. There is a rough justice in this. No system is foolproof, but none is more foolish than one which would dare crown a definitive champion from among a multitude of unblemished teams. Worse, none of the rankings can be regarded as reliable. Coaches tend to vote for their friends and upcoming opponents.
Sportswriters demonstrate regional bias and are sometimes slow to recognize emerging powers.
The New York Times assigns extra credit for running up the score. Sagarin weighs margin of victory only up to 28 points. Presumably, the excesses of each rating system are balanced by the excesses of the others. But the Seattle Times was the only one of the five polls - computer printouts to place UCLA higher than third this week, and that is the one that seems to count. Tennessee and UCLA would finish the season in the Fiesta Bowl and Kansas State would finish the season seething.