Nebraska football coach Bill Callahan holds a unique place in the pantheon of USA Today poll voters. While most of his peers were busy padding their own teams' resumes by voting them higher, only Callahan had the humility to actually vote his team one spot lower than where it ended up in the final rankings.

In an effort to promote some sort of responsibility among the coaching ranks, all of the votes in the final poll of the regular season were made public. Ohio State's Jim Tressel abstained—perhaps fearing the consequences from angry Florida or Michigan fans—but all of the other eligible coaches voted.

While some coaches were just wacky—Florida Atlantic's Howard Schnellenberger ranked both LSU and Oklahoma at least 10 spots below where they ended up—other coaches have a pretty clear agenda: Help themselves. On average, eligible coaches of teams receiving votes for the Top 25 ranked their teams about three spots higher than average. Perhaps most telling—10 of these coaches ranked their team as high or higher than any other coach did. And while Clemson's coach Tommy Bowden didn't give Clemson its highest ranking, his Dad, Florida State coach Bobby Bowden, did.

Several writers have made the point that coaches should have no business ranking teams. After all, they usually haven't had the time to even watch many of the teams play, and their votes can play a big role in determining which teams reap the spoils of BCS bids. Mostly, though, they shouldn't be voting because they're not all like Bill Callahan, and they can't be counted on to be objective about the merits of their own team.

So if we must keep the coaches poll, how about not letting coaches rank their own teams? (In order to keep the tallies square, each team's average rank from the rest of the ballots for that week could simply be added to its coach's poll after he submits it.)

A ranking of the poll's coaches, in order from least to most brazen :