Monday, November 06, 2006

Irony, Polls and TAFKAF

So ... I was going to wait til Tuesday to write about this because I hoped to include a couple of other tidbits but since they haven't developed I'm goin with what I've got.

Each week several organizations publish polls to tell everyone who the best teams in the country are. Of course they're essentially meaningless except to provide certain types of pudknockers with fodder for their little rants about where their team should be ranked and/or endless diatribes filled with mostly witless remarks about how meaningless the polls are.

So ... all that is pretty much irrelevant to my purpose here. Amongst all the hosers that endlessly debate the polls there is one agreement: USA Today's weekly poll is crap. This weeks "real" polls have UAF ranked. I'm all good with that. I suppose their sweeps of Air Force and Ferris St. plus a win and a tie on the road at UNO for a 6-1-2 record merit more than just casual consideration (even though they couldn't beat UAA on their own ice). So ... that's all irrelevant to my purpose here as well.

I'm writing because USA Today's poll has UAA ranked at #15. I've been silently tittering about that all day. Not because I think it has any relevance (my word of the day apparently). I'm laughing because I'm pretty damn sure that the folks at USA Today have totally been s'nook'ered by the UAF name change and completely got it wrong. I'll be generous to the voters in the USA Today poll and assume they correctly listed "Alaska" on their ballots. But the person(s) doing the grunt work simply didn't know the difference and put UAA there instead. Congrats to the UAF folks for causing confusion that gets them "dissed" in a national poll.

And finally just for the entertainment value (since I'm picking on UAF) ... the good folks over at INCH produce a regular feature called "found on a Cocktail Napkin" and this week they list ficticious ballot measures in honor of election day. This snippet is interesting ...

• Referendum UAA: Would change name of University of Alaska Anchorage to University of Not Fairbanks, Which is a Cold, Remote Outpost Where People Have No TV and Are Regularly Eaten by Abominable Snowmen.

Lastly the folks over at the College Hockey News Blog do their own top 15 every week. Guess who the number 15 team is? UAF ... sorta. Their list says "The Alaska Formerly Known as Fairbanks" or TAFKAF.

Is irony sweet or not? Oh yeah ... definitely sweet. Unless of course they actually did rank UAA 15th ... if that's the case then it's just more proof that the USA Today poll is crap. But I can't begin to believe that. UAA hasn't proven anything ... yet.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

UAA hasn't proven anything except that they can play with the defending natl. champs one week and the week before get swept in houghton. Of course mich tech has swept vermont in vermont, but then they get beat up on by a mediocre CC team, yeah I am confused, of course it does seem strange to rank a team ahead of its opponent that beat and tied them in their own barn. Well when all is said and done and UAA wins out they will be number one without dispute and the people will rejoice.

Anonymous said...

Like I posted on USCHO, the Fairbanks name change can only help UAA. If "Alaska" does well, UAA will get the credit. If UAA does well, everyone knows who they are. ;)

Anonymous said...

Damn TAFKAF.

As I was skimming the USCHO forum, I saw the thread with Alaska in the headline and clicked blindly only to find it was TAFKAF-related.

From now on it should be clearly spelled out: UAA Seawolves or TAFKAF Nanooks.

UAAalumni09 said...

anyone see the new Goseawolves website? Maybe donald can make a blog on that

Donald Dunlop said...

Yes they have a new website. I've started checking it out. But I don't think based on what I've seen today that ANYONE at UAA would really want me to say anything about it.

At this point I certainly cannot promote it. I'm a Mac based Internet user and they've changed the media links and content to force people to use Microsoft Media Player. I'll give them a while but it sure doesn't work on my machine.

I'm thinking if I can't access their media content then there won't be much point in continuing this blog. But then again it's just the first day. They have a feedback form so I'll use it but I don't have any hope that whoever they've hired to put this page together will have any sort of idea how to make things work on a Mac.

It's disappointing so far but frankly not surprising.

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