Why are the polls taken on Sunday?

Especially the coaches' poll. It's freakin ridiculous. Your typical coach wakes up Saturday, spends the morning preparing for his game, the afternoon at his game (if he's a halfway decent coach, he pays attention to his own game to the point of obliviousness to all others), 2 hours after the game in press conferences/team/coaches meetings, and if it's an away game, the rest of the night traveling home. For home games, they probably spend the rest of the night looking at the film of the game again.

And... they have to vote the top 25 teams early enough that the results are released by noon the next day. So, essentially, we have a group of people determining the rankings who are completely clueless to 117 of 119 teams they're supposed to know about until they wake up Sunday morning, which is going to be perhaps as much as 5(probably 2-3 for PAC-10 coaches) hours before the ballot is due. Five hours in which they're probably still spending most of the time looking over bits and pieces of their own games and those of their next week's opponent. So how are these people supposed to make an informed decision? Apparently, they're not, which is why you have things like Georgia Tech ranked ahead of Virginia Tech the day after GT stomped VT, and then the following week through the magic of the bye week (and someone actually informing the voters by that time of the result of the game) GT passing them.

This particular issue is easy to fix- release the polls (especially the coaches' poll, the AP guys are supposed to pay attention to a lot of games for their Sunday morning columns anyway) on Tuesday. That way, you can at least rest assured that all the voters will have had a chance to settle themselves for a little while and, perhaps, even had the time to check a newspaper for some box scores on which to base their votes. Of course, this does nothing to alleviate the conflict of interest inherent in the coaches' poll, namely, these guys all work for institutions that stand to benefit financially if their peers/conference members get the good bowls, and thus they have an incentive to vote those teams higher. But that's an argument for another day.