FOIA for coaches ballots?

It seems the final football coaches poll will again be kept a secret. SI.com's Andy Staples thinks he can get around it. Interesting.

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And come 2010, we'll have a bunch of millionaire coaches too scared to own up to their own ballots. That's OK. Remember, the vast majority of the voters work at public universities. Most states have open records or Freedom of Information Act laws that require the actions of public employees to be recorded and made available for public inspection. Come this fall, I'll be requesting the weekly ballot of every public-school coach in the poll. I imagine many of my colleagues will do the same. Come 2010, we should have the records request thing down pat.

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http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/andy_staples/05/27/coaches.poll.ap/index.html

 

At the local level FOIA is trampled upon, even more so in the last eight years if you know what I mean.

God bless them if they can pull this off.

As a side note, are game plans and scouting notes fair game under FOIA as well?

 

I think that the defense will be that the NCAA and BCS are private corporations or organizations, not public.

I don't agree with that. But courts have ruled that way in the past.

 

NCAA has nothing to do with this.

 

The BCS will claim the same status as the NCAA.

Might or might not fly.

 

Do you think every coach will vote for his own team if he can? Every team in the country is tied atop the first BCS poll!!!!

Will secrecy make the vote more honest? Or will it make it more dishonest? Discuss.

 

Dishonest. Definitely. If you can boost your team and screw some rival without any accountability or chance of repercussion, you'd be a fool not to.

 

Good god, who cares how a bunch of lying, cheating coaches vote in a useless poll..

 

The lying, cheating coaches who get to play for a "national championship," for one. They lying, cheating coaches who don't get to play for a "national championship," for two.

The hundreds of thousands of people who are fans of the schools that employ the aforementioned lying, cheating coaches, for three.

 

Something that may help is if the coaches use their school emails to submit their poll.
A simple request of "Any emails sent between such and such relating to the BCS football poll"... should do the trick.
And seeing as the money effect of the whole thing is huge, I don't think Staples, etc., will have much of a problem getting these.

 

FOIAs work a lot better when the university knows that a lawsuit awaits if they don't comply. Somehow I doubt SI will be suing any school for finding some bullshit, would-never-hold-up-in-court excuse not to release the ballots.

 

I had an FOIA rejected by the AD because "it would not serve the public's interest." My paper didn't think it was worthy of a lawsuit and the school got away with it.