The college football AP Poll has been under a lot of heat this week, with many fans and analysts who love the game calling for a change in the process and/or voters who create these important rankings each week of the season.
Composed of 62 sportswriters and broadcasters who submit an individual 25-team ranking, which is then averaged into the official poll, it is the most popular system fans and media use to determine which teams are superior to others throughout the majority of the season. While its importance has lessened over the years, specifically with College Football Playoff rankings determining playoff seeding, it is still a foundation that is built upon to create the playoff rankings.
This year specifically, the voters on the poll have been under scrutiny for basing their current rankings off of their preseason rankings rather than off of the actual football being played, or for simply not even watching the games and not caring about other results.
Under the most fire is beat writer for the USC Trojans, Haley Sawyer. After fans criticized her for moving Florida up two spots in her poll and leaving South Florida unranked (despite South Florida’s 18-16 win over Florida in the Swamp), a video released of her defending her rankings on Tuesday, saying, “It’s really fun for discussion, it doesn’t, you know, probably matter in the end.”
This may be the biggest example of an AP voter who didn’t put a lot of work into creating their ballot, but it is definitely not the only one, and is representative of larger problems within the process of making the poll.
A lot of voters already have a job to do, whether it is writing and covering a team who is playing that day, or hosting a show regarding college football. It is nearly impossible to ask these people to be able to pay close attention to everything going on in college football, because they already have a responsibility to do other things first, which leads to a domino effect.
If the voters aren’t able to see every result or watch every game, then it leads to basing a new week’s ranking off of their preseason poll, and not the results of games. This process can lead to an inaccurate representation of what the pecking order actually is in the sport, and it gives some teams more wiggle room than others to lose one or two games, simply because the expectations of one team was higher than the other.
This has accumulated a bigger push by fans across the country to not rank teams until a certain amount of games have been played. It makes no sense to have influence from preseason rankings when there are actual results on the field to base rankings off of.
The voters have their flaws, but it is ultimately on the leaders who organize and decide who gets to vote on the AP Poll who need to show initiative and cause change. It’s not the voters fault they have deadlines to meet with different employers who write their paycheck. So instead of giving them a vote on the poll, give the vote to people whose job it is to watch, analyze, and report on all the games every Saturday in the fall. Then you would see rankings based on merit, not expectation.
Because what’s the point of a poll which determines the best teams in before games, rather than after?