BYU and Media Bias: Looking at year end polls

[pelagius]

It seems like one of the things I hear quite frequently is that there is a media bias against BYU. That at least on a national level BYU is often ignored. Certainly, it seems to have intensified this year because of the TV contract. However, my sense is that many cougar fans believe BYU is often slighted. Do you think this is really true and how does it manifest itself? My first thought was that if there is a media bias against BYU that it should show up in the AP rankings. So I looked at year end AP rankings from 1976-2006 and compared them to year end Massey computer rankings. I defined bias as the following:

bias = Massey Computer Rank - AP Rank

Certainly some may argue that the computer rankings are biased against BYU as well. There is truth to this claim in the current BCS setup where the computer rankings can only use wins and loses and must throw out MOV. Thus BYU can't make up for poor SOS by winning by a large MOV. However, I am using a MOV a victory based ranking systems so it is not obvious that it is biased against BYU.

Here is what I found for years in which BYU was ranked in the year end AP poll:

Average Bias: -1.54
Median Bias: -1

Thus on average there was very little bias and in fact the average bias is actually negative. Meaning on average the AP has ranked BYU higher than the Massey. Furthermore, in every year where BYU was ranked in the top 20/25 by Massey they were also in the end of year AP poll.

Also, as a quick comparison I did the same thing for Ohio State:

Average Bias: -1.38
Median Bias: -1

BYU and Ohio State are almost identical. So do you think that griping about media bias is just one those "shared communal experiences" of fans everywhere or is there really a case for anti BYU bias? If there is how does it manifest itself?