I was shocked at the way that Craig James behaved on television this weekend. While John Saunders and Doug Flutie looked on and laughed, James held his laptop in the air and waved it at the camera as he spoke. He was blatantly antagonistic to those that spend a lot of time not only developing the ratings, but also updating them and keeping them current each week. As you can see from Billingsley's letter, James has never once attempted to learn the reasoning for the discrepancies between his own beliefs and what the numbers show. That ignorance to the work of not just one individual, but many, who have a very direct influence on the sport he covers is just uncalled for and Billingsley rightly attacks him for it.

On a personal note, I take great pride in what I do with regards to the rankings I generate, not only for college football, but also basketball, and a computer based "seeding" of teams for the NCAA tournament. It is the culmination of many hours of effort on my part and it is not without a great deal of thought despite being mainly driven by the numbers coming out of my computer.

I know firsthand the pain of the attacks that Billingsley is expressing. Last year, I was blasted repeatedly by fans of a few schools who were not rated highly in the MRI. I had them "out" of the NCAA tournament while many experts had guaranteed them as locks. These attacks came not only in comments here at MRISports.com, which I am sure many of you saw, but also in very harsh posts on message boards and other sites on the Internet. I am sure there were more that I didn't see, but those I did almost made me stop doing what I do. That's right. No more MRI, no more writing, no more MRISports.com.

Why? Because only one of the those making the comments made an attempt to understand what I had done, and understand how the MRI or the seedings were generated. And his understanding came not from one e-mail, but a long trading of discussion on the topic. In the end, we calmly agreed to disagree, but that peace was not achieved without some amount of learning on his part. The others, however, blindly spoke out without even trying to understand, or reading a disclaimer that I added into the bracket projections each week. More than anything, it made me sad that people were so blindly against another way of looking at things.

Last week, on FanIQ, I participated in a discussion which commented on how strange the computer polls looked in the first week. It was mentioned during that discussion that the computers do tend to look correct at the end of the season, and I applaud that realization.

So, before we totally dismiss the computers totally, I have a challenge for all of us, the Fans. I challenge us to take the higher standard that Billingsley asks us to in his letter. Let's work to understand those computers before we dismiss them as out of sorts or wrong. We all might just learn something.

Ben Miraski writes for MRISports.com and is a featured blogger on FanIQ. Readers can contact Ben at bmiraski@mrisports.com