As the returns from the latest college football Saturday come pouring in, it seems that Harvard has polled amazingly among machines aged one to five, but terribly among people aged 30-60.

The disparity between the opinions of the animate and inanimate is quite distinct and one worth illustrating, if for no other reason than to further discredit the merit of human polls.

Here is a quick sampling of the rankings given to the Harvard football team by the eight most widely cited computer polls:

Massey—6th

Matthews—3rd

Sagarin—9th

Laz Index—7th

Dwiggins—6th

Self—4th

Sauceda—3rd

Ashburn—1st

The average rank bestowed upon the Crimson by those eight polls is essentially fifth in all of I-AA (4.88). Let that sink in. Fifth.

Now call up your friends at Florida or USC and tell them you go to a football school. When they stop laughing, pass along the information presented above. When they continue laughing, hang up on them.

Now, there are a few of you out there who would make the argument (which usually includes the crackpot New York Times computer ranking as exhibit A) that computer polls are out of touch with reality and lack the subjectivity necessary to create an applicable ranking system. That reasoning can explain why one poll might place a team way too high or low, but in the face of eight different polls—all of which essentially agree—that contention seems to fall apart.

Then, there are the three human polls—ESPN/USA Today, Sports Network and AnyGivenSaturday.com. Harvard barely cracked the top 25 in all three, finishing 19th, 22nd and 19th in each of the aforementioned polls, respectively.