A guide to the AP Top 25: who votes and how points add up

The machine in one paragraph

The AP Top 25 is a poll of sportswriters and broadcasters who cover college football. According to ESPN's primer, AP staff choose the panel but do not vote themselves, and the AP tries to have every state with an FBS school represented by at least one voter. Each voter ranks 25 teams on a secure online ballot. First place is worth 25 points and 25th is worth one. The ballots are tabulated automatically, and teams are sorted by total points. That really is the whole mechanism.

The ballot count needs a word of explanation, because ESPN describes the panel as about 60 people. Every ballot names exactly one No. 1, so the first-place votes in a poll add up to the number of ballots. When I added them for the 2026 preseason poll published by College Football HQ on SI, they came to 69: Ohio State 40, Oregon 14, Indiana 8, Notre Dame 6 and Miami 1.

Reading the numbers beside each team

A poll listing usually shows a rank, a team, its record, a number in parentheses and a points total. The parentheses hold first-place votes. They get the headlines. The points total decides the order, and the two do not always agree.

The 2026 preseason poll shows it neatly. Indiana drew eight first-place votes and ranked sixth, two spots behind Notre Dame, which drew six. Georgia sat third without a single first-place vote. A team that is everybody's second or third choice can outscore a team that a handful of voters adore and the rest shrug at.

With 69 ballots, a unanimous No. 1 would earn 69 times 25, or 1,725 points. That ceiling is a useful ruler. When the gap between two teams is a few points, they are effectively level; when it is hundreds, the room has made up its mind.

Ties happen too. BYU and USC finished level at No. 14 in that preseason poll, which is why the list skips from 14 straight to Michigan at 16. Nobody was left out; two teams simply shared a line.

The line below No. 25

Under the ranked teams comes a list headed "others receiving votes." Any team named on any ballot earns points, so a school that one voter slots at No. 25 and everyone else ignores appears there with exactly one point. In the 2026 preseason poll, Liberty, Western Michigan, Tulane and Virginia each finished with one point.

I think this is the most human line on the page. Behind each of those single points is one voter who saw something the rest of the panel did not, and said so in public. It is also a quiet preview. SI's preseason notes point out that James Madison and Tulane both started the 2025 season unranked and still reached the College Football Playoff.

Why teams jump, slide and sometimes fall after a win

Nothing in the poll moves a team automatically. There is no set penalty for a loss, no bonus for margin and no formula connecting one week to the next. Each Sunday, every voter submits a fresh top 25, and the new order is just the new sum.

ESPN's summary of the AP's guidance asks voters to judge "performance, not program reputation or preseason speculation," to avoid regional bias and to weigh head-to-head results. Teams on NCAA probation remain eligible. Inside those guardrails, voters have wide latitude. A team can win and still slip a spot if enough voters decide that the team below it looked better, and a Saturday full of upsets can lift a team that did not even play.

That is also why early polls deserve a light touch. SI notes that only two preseason No. 1 teams this century have gone on to win the national title. My favorite counterexample is recent: Indiana opened the 2025 season at No. 20 in the preseason poll and finished it as national champion.

Why the AP poll does not choose the playoff

The AP Top 25 has no formal role in selecting the College Football Playoff. Since 2014 that job has belonged to a separate 13-member selection committee, as ESPN notes. The AP had already stepped back from the old system: in December 2004, after a run of controversies, it asked that its poll no longer be used in the BCS standings, and 2004 was the last season it counted.

For 2026, the committee's first top 25 arrives on Tuesday, November 3, and its final rankings and 12-team bracket on Sunday, December 6, according to the College Football Playoff. Our companion piece lays out the two lists side by side. The short version: the AP poll reads the room, and the committee's list decides who plays.

A poll invented to fill the paper

The whole thing began as newspaper craft. The poll was the idea of AP sports editor Alan J. Gould, who later described it, according to his Wikipedia biography, as "something to keep the pot boiling." Papers wanted something to print between games. Ninety years later they still do, and the Sunday list keeps doing the job it was built for.

So read it the way it was designed to be read. The rank is a headline, the points are the story, and the one-point teams at the bottom are somebody's hunch that might look brilliant by December.