by Dave Hickman , Charleston Gazette

The Colts brought McAfee in for a workout and an interview the week before the NFL draft and then promptly released veteran Hunter Smith, who then signed with Washington.

Then, after picking McAfee in the seventh round and watching him in the team's first rookie mini-camp, Indianapolis released the only other punter on the roster, Mike Dragosavich, whom they had signed as a free agent only a month earlier.

Just a guess, but I'm thinking it's going to be pretty hard for McAfee not to make the Colts' roster.

-It's also a given, of course, that Pat White will make Miami's roster, pretty much regardless of what he does between now and the start of the season. NFL teams don't use a second-round pick on a quarterback and then not give him every chance in the world.

How the Dolphins sort out their quarterback situation, though, is going to be interesting to watch. Chad Pennington is the unquestioned starter and second-year man Chad Henne and White are the only other contenders. But seldom do NFL teams keep three QBs active for games because they are limited to 45-man active rosters on game days. They can keep another eight players on the inactive list.

The NFL's often-bizarre rules make this intriguing. A team's third quarterback (the one on the inactive list) can enter a game, but if he does so before the fourth quarter then neither of the two active quarterbacks is permitted to return to the game (don't ask why, it's the NFL). What makes the Miami situation so interesting is that White isn't generally regarded as an every-down NFL quarterback, so can the team afford to make him the second active QB and ask him to finish a game if Pennington is hurt? And in that situation, if Henne is the inactive guy and they bring him in to finish the game, they lose White as the Wildcat (or, as they're calling it, the WildPat) quarterback.

I suppose you could keep White active as a wide receiver or a running back, but the NFL would frown on that unless the Dolphins actually used him in those roles and didn't just list him there to skirt the rule.

At the very least, it's a situation not many teams face and one that will be interesting to watch play out.

-So college football's coaches now want to revert back to secrecy for their Top 25 ballots, huh?

Not only that, there's a move afoot to not only stop publishing the individual coaches' ballots on the final regular-season poll, but to not even list the names of the 61 coaches who are doing the voting.

It all stems from a study the American Football Coaches Association commissioned to find out if there were ways to improve the accuracy and credibility of their poll, which counts for one-third of the Bowl Championship Series rating formula (the Harris poll of ex-coaches and others, along with the composite computer ratings, are the other components).

Granted, there is something to be said for secrecy in the voting. Coaches tend to feel pressure from all sorts of different places (their own conference, public perception, the good of their own squads, etc.) when they vote, knowing that their ballots are going to go public. On the other hand, if they aren't made public there's no accountability, and if someone wants to skew the results it's easy to do.

Here's an idea, though. Get out of the business. The Associated Press pulled its poll from the BCS formula because it made the media participants in the process, which they shouldn't be. And neither should the coaches.

Of course, that would mean another major overhaul of the BCS ratings formula, but is that such a bad idea?

Reach Dave Hickman at 304-348-1734 or dphickman1@aol.com

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