What college football ranking is your paper using?

I was just wondering.
My metro this weekend dumped the AP rankings for the BCS since the AP doesn't have any input into the national championship and I was wondering if anyone else was already doing this or was going to.

 

This is a good question ...

While we publish the BCS standings and avoid the Harris poll altogether, we acknowledge Podunk U's and Podunk U's opponents' place in the AP standings as "official". We also refer to Podunk U's place in the AP basketball rankings, and use Baseball America for Podunk U's hard-ball club.

We are a member of The Associated Press, which awards a national championship dating back to leather helmets. The AP is considered the "true" constant poll. The BCS is a moneymaking organization which hands out a neat crystal football after their made-for-TV affair.

My $0.02, adjusted for inflation.

rb

 

To be honest, Jay, I see no excuse for any paper not giving all three. They're all part of the mix; they're all argued about.

 

Whitlock's.

 

Especially if you're a West Virginia media outlet.

 

We publish all of the rankings on our Scoreboard page, but for gamers/previews/score overlays we use AP.

 

You need to RUN all three polls in the Monday paper.

But I hope you don't mean that all three should be used in a typical story.

"Joe Blow ran for 245 yards and three touchdowns to lead No. 8 (AP), No. 7 (USA Today), No. 11 Tennessee (BCS) to a 41-3 victory over South Carolina."

We use AP, and the reasoning is pretty clear.

They are the oldest. They are the most consistent (no tweaking from year to year). And chances are you are using AP copy . . . which will use AP rankings.

If you ask copy editors to change all rankings in an SEC roundup to BCS rankings or change their "How AP top 25 fared" chart to "How BCS top 25 fared", there will be (or should be) a revolt.

 

Even Gannett papers use AP rankings over The Flagship's coaches' poll.

It's like BTE said, all the copy you run use AP rankings, so it's crazy to try to convert all those gamers and features and mentions and "How the Top 25" fared, etc.

But you run all three polls.

 

Oh, I'm sorry. If you're talking about references in a story, we go AP. Exclusively. I wouldn't list all three.

 

This particular paper still runs all the polls, but when look at the Top 25 roundup or scoreboard, it reflects the BCS rankings and not the AP's.
So West Virginia might be No. 3 in the AP, but for Thursday's game, if these are the BCS rankings, it would be No. 4 West Virginia vs. No. 6 Louisville.
Personally, I think it is dumb and shortsighted. I mean what happens if you have a split national championship with the AP going one way and the the BCS going another? Never mind all the additional work it creates for the desk. It also creates confusion, people see the rankings on TV and already you have ABC/ESPN using one, CBS using another and the paper a third.
So if the mission of the BCS was to create clarity, it has failed that.

 

West Virginia's got media?
I thought Raby wrote for the other 49 states...

 

I noticed yesterday that CBS was using the coaches poll for the Georgia-Florida game -- it had No. 8 Florida vs. No. 25 Georgia. I don't know if CBS always uses the coaches' poll, but the matchup might not have looked as good on the promo if they used the AP numbers because Georgia wasn't ranked.