Caught this story coming across the wire on Saturday; once we managed to overcome the intense vomiting, diarrhea, vertigo and lumber lung that reading it caused us, we decided to share it with you. After this week’s Coaches’ Poll came out, some astute observers noticed that Duke (1-10 last season) received one vote for the Top 25. Surely this was a clerical error of some sort, right?

Think again — you see, former Duke and Florida coach Steve Spurrier, now at the University of South Carolina, confirmed that he was the one vote; not only that, Spurrier said he always tosses a vote Duke’s way, a sign of gratitude to the program who gave him his first head coaching gig:

“Yeah, I claim that. I’ve been voting for the boys from Duke since, oh, about 1990, whenever I started voting on that poll. I just want ’em to know that I haven’t forgotten about ’em and I appreciate everything they did for me. That’s why I did it.”

Don’t get us wrong, we think presason polls are in fact a joke. Everytime they come out, we share in a moment of excitement checking out where OUR team is, then laugh as we see at least 10 teams horrendously overhyped or underrated; but we accept this annual ritual as a necessary evil of college athletics. After all–how would ESPN and ABC manage to hype games with a bunch of unranked teams? They might have to resort to tactics like rule changes that shorten games, or something awful like that.

However, seeing as there’s been more than a fair share of contention surrounding the coaches’ poll in the past few years (enough to keep seemingly-deserving teams out of title games, and lead to all sorts of post-Championship debating and bellyaching), it’d be nice if jackholes like Steve Spurrier could help preserve some of the illusion that the system is any better than throwing darts blindly at a dartboard.

Our Polling Process May Be Flawed [Deadspin]