After four years of relative transparency in its year-end ballots, the ages-old Coaches’ poll — one-third of the formula for spitting out the all-powerful BCS rankings — is going secret again for individual results in 2010, on the recommendation of the professionals:

"Gallup said, ‘Look, why do you think they have curtains and booths for voting?’" [American Football Coaches Association] executive director Grant Teaff said. "They said it’s because you get the truest vote from an anonymous vote."

The Internet disagrees — see, most prominently, here, here, here, here or here, all of which are variations on the same theme: Why does the Coaches’ poll hate America? Or, at least, the fundamental American values of transparency and integrity? At random, I’ll let ESPN’s Pat Forde speak for the truth-seeking mob:

College football coaches love secrecy. This we already know.
[…]
So I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise to see the American Football Coaches Association announce Wednesday that, starting in 2010, the final Top 25 ballots in the USA Today coaches’ poll will no longer be made public.

That’s just coaches being coaches.

It’s also coaches being cowards.

Deadline writers love pouncing on fat, slow-moving targets, preferably while also employing a ton of paragraph breaks. This we already know. That’s just columnists being columnists. And yet, for all the ink pixels spilled over the coaches’ affront to decency and democracy, only the Austin American Statesman’s Kirk Bohls took the crucial step and got existential with it (emphasis added):

The coaches should remove themselves from the entire process because of clear conflicts of interest, some of which involve big financial bonuses in their contracts as well as biases for or against certain coaches.

While the rest of his colleagues wring their hands over the "integrity" of the process, Bohls is the only one who sees clearly enough to call the poll what it is, "a charade" hardly worth refining in any format. A poll of coaches has never made sense: They may know strategy, blocking and tackling, but no decent coach will have any good idea about any teams except his own and the other dozen on its schedule, much less the means for making a critical comparison across conferences with good data. Coaches are also perhaps the most self-interested parties in the entire process, and they vote that way: Contrary to Teaff’s assurances, the poll has consistently reeked of bias since the final ballots were made public. Steve Spurrier famously undermines the poll’s integrity on a yearly basis by reserving his final spot for Duke in the preseason; coaches at the end of the year are corralled into voting the winner of the BCS Championship game No. 1, even if — as with snubbed regular season No. 1 Southern Cal in 2003, which fell behind No. 2 LSU for strictly bureaucratic reasons despite throttling Michigan in the Rose Bowl — they don’t agree with the vote. It only remains relevant at all by its intimate association with the biggest charade in sports, the BCS, from which even the old hacks in the Associated Press poll had the sense to distance themselves after everything hit the fan in 2004.

None of this changes by publishing or hiding the coaches’ final vote, neither of which has ever produced the slightest controversy of any relevance; other than the semantic debate about Mack Brown and Kyle Whittingham’s rebellious No. 1 votes in January, I don’t recall a single headline over the last four years that relied on a specific coach’s public ballot. (If it references a vote at all, the reporter probably just asked the coach on record.) Nothing changed when the year-end votes became public, and nothing will change when they go back behind the curtain. "Transparency" is not the problem. The problem has always been that there are votes at all.