AP poll
| Inaugural AP polls | |
|---|---|
| Div I/FBS football | 1936 |
| Div I/FCS football | 1978 |
| Div I men's basketball | 1948–49 |
| Div I women's basketball | 1976–77 |
| Current AP polls | |
| FBS football | 2016 season |
| FCS football | 2016 season |
| Div I men's basketball | 2016–17 season |
| Div I women's basketball | 2016–17 season |
The Associated Press (AP Poll) provides weekly rankings of the top 25 NCAA teams in one of three Division I college sports: football, men's basketball and women's basketball. The rankings are compiled by polling 65 sportswriters and broadcasters from across the nation. Each voter provides his own ranking of the top 25 teams, and the individual rankings are then combined to produce the national ranking by giving a team 25 points for a first place vote, 24 for a second place vote, and so on down to 1 point for a twenty-fifth place vote. Ballots of the voting members in the AP Poll are made public.
The football poll is released Sundays at 2pm Eastern time during the football season, unless ranked teams have not finished their games.
The AP college football poll has a long history. The news media began running their own polls of sports writers to determine who was, by popular opinion, the best football team in the country at the end of the season. One of the earliest such polls was the AP College Football Poll, first run in 1934. In 1935, AP sports editor Alan J. Gould declared a three way tie for national champion in football between Minnesota, Princeton, and Southern Methodist. Minnesota fans protested, and a number of Gould's colleagues led by Charles "Cy" Sherman suggested he create a poll of sports editors instead of only using his own list, and the next year the poll was born. It has run continuously from 1936.
Due to the long-standing historical ties between individual college football conferences and high-paying bowl games like the Rose Bowl and Orange Bowl, the NCAA had not held a tournament or championship game to determine the champion of what is now the highest division, NCAA Division I, Football Bowl Subdivision (the Division I, Football Championship Subdivision and lower divisions do hold championship tournaments). As a result, the public and the media began to acknowledge the leading vote-getter in the final AP Poll as the national champion for that season.
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