Trace the AP poll from a 1935 argument to today's Top 25
The AP Top 25 exists because one editor's 1935 rankings went over badly in Minnesota. Follow the poll from that storm to the 25-team Sunday list.
In 1935, the AP's sports editor ranked college football's teams by himself and named three of them co-No. 1. According to the AP's own 2016 retrospective, Minnesota fans, as the story goes, hanged Alan J. Gould in effigy. Most ranking systems start with a spreadsheet. This one started with a grudge in Minneapolis, and I find that oddly reassuring about the ninety years of arguing that followed.
It created a storm in the Big Ten in general, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, in particular.
Which three teams shared that 1935 title depends on who you ask. The 2016 AP story names Minnesota, Princeton and TCU. Wikipedia's AP poll history cites Gould's own December 3, 1935 column, headlined "Mustangs, Tigers, Gophers Are Ranked as Equal," which points to SMU rather than TCU. We could not settle it from a primary archive, but I would lean on the headline written that week over a memory recorded decades later.
1936: spread the responsibility around
Gould's fix was to stop ranking alone. The AP's 2016 story says he realized it was best to spread the responsibility, and the first writers' poll followed on October 20, 1936. Thirty-five writers each listed a top 10. First place was worth ten points, second nine, and so on, and the AP ranked the 20 teams with the most points.
Minnesota won that first poll with 32 of 35 first-place votes and 345 of 350 possible points. Then, on October 31, Northwestern beat the Gophers 6-0 at Evanston, ending a run in which Minnesota had not lost in more than three years. Northwestern took over the top spot for a stretch. Minnesota was still named the AP champion when the season ended.
That arc set the tone for everything since. A loss in a poll is not a verdict. It is a data point that 35 people, or today 69, get to weigh.
Gould never pretended the poll was a grand scientific project. In a recollection quoted on his Wikipedia biography from a 2001 book by Herschel Nissenson, he called it "just another exercise in hoopla." The same editor, by that page's account, was the first to call a sweep of tennis's four major titles a "Grand Slam" in 1933. The man had an ear for a phrase that sticks.
The changes that built the modern Top 25
- 1950: The AP runs its first preseason poll.
- 1961 to 1967: The poll shrinks to only 10 teams, before returning to 20.
- 1965: The AP waits until after the bowls to name a champion, and top-ranked Michigan State loses to UCLA in the Rose Bowl.
- 1968: The post-bowl final poll becomes permanent.
- 1989: The poll expands to 25 teams.
- December 2004: The AP asks that its poll stop being used in the BCS standings.
- 2014: A 13-member College Football Playoff committee takes over selection, and the AP poll carries on alongside it.
The 1965 decision is my favorite on that list. Waiting a few extra weeks looked fussy until the No. 1 team lost its bowl game. It took three more seasons for the AP to make post-bowl voting permanent, and the Coaches Poll did not follow until the 1974 season.
What the 1936 design still explains
Much of the current poll is the 1936 poll made bigger. The top 10 became a top 25, the 35 writers became a panel of about 60 to 70, and ten points for first became 25. ESPN's primer describes the rest in terms Gould would recognize: ballots are summed, and the results are published on a fixed weekly schedule, now Sundays at 2 p.m. Eastern for most of the season.
The effigy has not made a comeback, which counts as progress. And Minnesota, the team whose fans started all this, turned up in the 2026 preseason poll with five points in the "others receiving votes" line. Ninety years after winning the very first ballot, the Gophers are still on somebody's list.
Sources
Every factual claim above traces to one of these. Links open in a new tab.
