photo by: AP Photo/Brynn Anderson

Ohio State celebrates after their win against Notre Dame in the College Football Playoff national championship game Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, in Atlanta.

The 2024 season was my first as a voter in the Associated Press’ national college football poll.

After submitting a preseason top-25 ranking at the start of August, each week I stayed up until the wee hours to ensure I could catch every relevant college football result, then turned in a revised poll. My selections were tallied alongside those of about 60 other voters to assemble the AP Top 25 rankings that receive nationwide scrutiny throughout the college football season.

On Monday night, moments after Ohio State beat Notre Dame for the national title, I submitted the 17th and final AP ballot of the season; I had also previously voted for AP’s All-America teams and All-Big 12 teams.

I’m very grateful to have the opportunity to serve in this role, which allows me to watch college football through a different lens and broaden my perspective beyond the tunnel vision I can sometimes develop as someone so focused on covering the University of Kansas on a day-to-day basis — which in turn makes me better on the KU beat because of my greater background knowledge of many of the teams the Jayhawks face.

But I definitely had a lot to learn along the way this past season.

As much as we all try to conduct evidence-based analysis, inevitably, assembling a ranking involves constructing hypotheticals: Is this one-loss SEC team really better than an unbeaten Big 12 team when the two have no comparable opponents? Is this unbeaten Group of Five team better than a one- or two-loss power-conference team? Many of these questions never get answered in any meaningful way, and as the college football world saw throughout the CFP, often they get answered in a way we might not expect. (Notre Dame beating Georgia and Arizona State dragging Texas into double overtime come to mind.) Sometimes, the ways I parsed through these hypotheticals manifested my inexperience as a voter. Here are a few anecdotes that come to mind from over the course of the year.

photo by: AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson

Washington head coach Jedd Fisch watches from the sideline during the first half of an NCAA college football game against Washington State, Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024, in Seattle.

Preseason: I was way too high on Washington

Assembling my initial AP Top 25 poll as someone who had never before built any sort of national ranking was a challenging exercise. I consulted last year’s final national rankings, preseason polls from the relevant conferences, and various exhaustive lists of transfer additions, while delving into recent local reporting on teams about which I was particularly ambivalent. Of course, the first poll was due on Aug. 1, so fall camp had only just begun for most schools and little concrete information was available about how any team would actually look.

I thought I had a leg up in the Big 12, having participated in various league-specific polls over the years, and felt confident in ranking Utah, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, KU and Arizona in the Top 25 (the same sort of disastrous decision that befell many of my fellow voters as four of those teams ultimately finished below .500), but had a lot of work to do to familiarize myself with other conferences. My plan was to pick what I thought were the 25 best teams overall and then order them from there.

When it came time to determine how I would represent the Big Ten in my top 25, I figured Washington, the national runner-up from 2023, would be a shoo-in. I understood that the Huskies were losing virtually everyone who powered their miracle run, including head coach Kalen DeBoer, quarterback Michael Penix Jr. and a trio of NFL-bound wide receivers, not to mention everybody who went into the portal after DeBoer’s departure. But I had been impressed by the job Jedd Fisch did at Arizona and figured that the talent he brought along would help offset UW’s losses. It wouldn’t be a complete reset like when Fisch took over the Wildcats and went 1-11. Sure, the Huskies wouldn’t be competing for a title again any time soon, but they deserved to start the year with a number next to their name, right?

Well, it turned out that basically no one else thought so. Only five of 62 voters ranked UW at the start of the year, and by putting them at No. 16 I went three places higher than the next closest, Alex Taylor of WyoSports. It didn’t look like too terrible of a selection for a few fleeting weeks until the Huskies lost to Rutgers on Sept. 27 to drop to 3-2. They finished the year 6-7 with a loss in the Sun Bowl and were lightyears away from being a top team nationally.

photo by: AP Photo/Barry Reeger

SMU offensive lineman Justin Osborne warms up before the game against Penn State in the first round of the NCAA College Football Playoff, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024, in State College, Pa.

Week 2: I lost faith in SMU too quickly

I had a good feeling about SMU in the preseason, for reasons both valid and invalid. I thought the Mustangs’ AAC championship pedigree under Rhett Lashlee would serve them well in what looked like a weak, wide-open ACC, which was correct; I thought Preston Stone would make a leap to become one of the nation’s top quarterbacks, which was not remotely correct, because instead he got benched almost immediately for Kevin Jennings.

Regardless, I put SMU No. 24 in the preseason and was one of just 11 voters with the Mustangs ranked; I left them in the top 25 after they underwhelmed against Nevada, but was far too ready to drop them out when they lost to BYU 18-15. Of course, none of us had any idea at the time, the second week of the season, that BYU was going to turn out to be a Big 12 title contender, but I could easily have restored the Mustangs to my ranking after they put up 66 on TCU, or demolished once-promising Florida State the next week. In other words, I should have been like Josh Furlong of KSL.com, the only person to rank SMU either of those weeks.

Instead, even as BYU turned out to be highly competent (more on that later), I stubbornly refused to bring the Mustangs back until Oct. 20, and even then only at No. 24, after having passed them up for teams like Iowa and Michigan that didn’t end up being particularly remarkable by season’s end. Then SMU went on to make the College Football Playoff and I felt especially foolish.

photo by: AP Photo/Eric Gay

BYU players celebrate after their win over Colorado in the Alamo Bowl NCAA college football game, Saturday, Dec. 28, 2024, in San Antonio.

Week 4 and on: The BYU saga

One of the most challenging aspects of my first season as an AP voter was figuring out how to deal with unranked teams that beat ranked foes. Did they suddenly need to enter the top 25, even if their seasons had been undistinguished otherwise? And if they did, would they automatically have to be ranked above the teams they beat to earn their spots in the first place? Would they have to stay ahead of those teams for the remainder of the season as long as both maintained reasonably consistent form?

For example, many of my fellow voters ranked Northern Illinois, including three as high as No. 17, after the Huskies stunned Notre Dame in Week 2. Some, understandably, put them above the Irish, who had previously been the No. 5 team in the nation. But then the next time NIU took the field it lost to Buffalo and never sniffed the rankings again. The Huskies went .500 in their conference and won the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, while the Irish went to the CFP title game.

I did not rank NIU and felt good about that decision. But when I took a similar tack with BYU at first later in the season, it turned me into a subject of opprobrium from the Cougars’ extremely passionate national fan base.

BYU started its Big 12 campaign with a bang late at night on Sept. 21 by demolishing then-No. 13 Kansas State 38-9, one of the earliest signs that the conference race would not be remotely like what many (including me) had envisioned. At the time I thought K-State had acquitted itself well in a road win over Tulane and home blowout of Arizona, and didn’t want to drop the Wildcats out of the rankings for what looked like an aberration in a late-night road game.

I also didn’t think much of BYU’s victories over Southern Illinois and Wyoming and had lost faith, as I said, in SMU. So I dropped KSU six spots and inserted into the rankings some unbeaten teams whose resumes I liked, like Illinois (with wins over KU and Nebraska) and Pittsburgh (with wins over Cincinnati and West Virginia).

I didn’t catch much flak that week, but two weeks later the floodgates started to open. I had ranked BYU on Sept. 28 after its narrow road victory over Baylor, but for whatever reason it was after the Cougars’ and Wildcats’ idle week, Oct. 5, that the public realized I still had BYU lower than K-State. That fact combined with a particularly high ranking for BYU’s one-loss rival, Utah, galvanized the Cougar faithful, who kept my phone buzzing with X notifications for a few days.

I was amused by some of the messages I got, including one that accused me of having nightmares about Dallin Hall — the BYU basketball guard who helped carry the Cougars to a stunning upset at Allen Fieldhouse last February — and another aghast that I also had Alabama ranked over Vanderbilt.

The experience certainly provided a stark illustration of the public platform afforded by an AP vote. An order of abstract numbers and logos that made perfect sense to me, submitted at an ungodly hour from a hotel room in Tempe, Arizona, following KU’s brutal loss there, appeared utterly ridiculous and patently offensive to those a couple states away.

But the experience was also ephemeral, as I stopped hearing from the folks in Provo, Utah, down the stretch. I was generally still on the lower end of the vote distribution for BYU, but pushed the Cougars as high as No. 8 on my ballot before they suffered late-season losses to KU and Arizona State.

Even if those defeats took some of the luster off the Cougars’ memorable season, the BYU fans were absolutely right about the quality of their team. I think the experience encouraged me to be a bit more free-flowing with regard to my rankings. It’s extremely difficult to avoid anchor bias — i.e., in this case, letting the initial preseason Top 25, as difficult as it was to construct, exert too much influence on successive editions of my poll. It’s tricky, because you don’t want to be too reactive to early-season results, like what happened to Notre Dame, either.

Maybe I could defend keeping K-State a few spots above BYU after the Cougars’ victory — other voters did it too — but I should have examined in greater detail the resumes of teams I had between them like two-loss Michigan and USC. Those had been my No. 8 and No. 16 teams by Week 2 of the season and I gave them far too much grace for the sorts of losses for which I would have treated previously unranked teams harshly.

With the 2024 season at an end, I look forward to my next chance to put these principles into action. Hall may not haunt my dreams, but I do spare the occasional retrospective thought for the social media user who suggested he kept me up at night, and the principles that user was espousing.