AP Top 25 controversy raises crucial question: Who should have a vote?

One of the hardest jobs for college reporters falls on Sunday morning, when they’re tasked with ranking the top 25 teams in the country for four months straight after a weekend of college football. Sure, the hype of the AP top 25 poll dies down after the College Football Playoff committee releases their rankings, but it’s a task every beat reporter selected to vote takes some pride in to an extent. 

How exactly are the voters chosen and is the process the most efficient? After all, the voters themselves are knowledgeable, but they’re typically beat reporters and not always national reporters. The beat reporters have a grasp on their specific team, the national reporters know more about a lot more teams – generally speaking. 

Let’s dive into the controversy that’s taken center stage in light of some questionable decisions by some of the AP voters this past week. 

How do you become an AP voter in each week's poll?

The AP voters each week are members of the Associated Press and selected by AP before the season starts. The voters consist of national reporters as well as specific beat reporters for teams. While AP employees can’t vote, they help choose who the voters are. The pool of voters consists of one voter per state that has an FBS team and increases with the number of FBS teams with four slots available for national reporters.

The controversy behind weekly voters in the AP top 25 poll

The controversy started because an X platform account called out one of the voters for ranking Florida two spots higher than its Week 2 ranking, despite losing to an unranked team. The Gators were ultimately booted from the top 25. Which brings up the double-edged sword with the AP vote. Obviously, the individual vote didn’t directly impact Florida’s standing directly, but it could have. 

The votes should be taken seriously and while it’s hard to keep up with every single college football game and every single college football team, a quick google search and browse through the college football sub-section of ESPN could help out. There’s no way anybody should be voting to rank a team higher than their previous ranking if they lost. 

That’s just laziness so it’s fair to call into question the credibility of the AP voters when things like this happen. What if multiple people would have done that? Then Florida could have ended up ranked higher than South Florida despite losing to them, that doesn’t make sense. I’m not saying the person that did this shouldn’t be allowed to vote, but is there a better way to get better votes each week from the AP?

The debate behind who should vote and if there’s a better process

The biggest problem with the current format the AP uses is there’s limited slots for national voters while beat reporters take up the majority of the spots. That’s good they get some of the most knowledgeable people to vote, but they’re typically only knowledgeable about the teams they cover and maybe the team with their respective teams conferences.

And even if they are knowledgeable about some of the other teams that could get into the poll, they usually don’t have a lot of time to actually do research about the other games, valuing performances, wins and losses, etc. Think about a beat reporter that covers Michigan for example. After filing all their content it’s well into Sunday morning and then to get up in a few hours to get a vote in before it closes, there’s no way they had time to properly evaluate. 

That’s not a knock on them at all, but proof that the current process is flawed. I think the easiest fix is to have more national voters as they’re spending most of their weekend watching every game they can fit on one screen. This takes the pressure off beat reporters to get everything right, especially when it’s more of a voluntary vote at that.