When the first AP Top 25 men's college basketball poll was published in January 1949, Saint Louis was installed at No. 1 ahead of mighty Kentucky, thanks to a head-to-head win a few weeks earlier in New Orleans.
The poll did exactly what was intended, and what it has continued to do for 75 years: It sparked debate.
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Were the Billikens of coach Eddie Hickey — the defending NIT champions at a time when that tournament was more prestigious than the NCAA Tournament — really deserving of the top spot? Would the Wildcats of Adolph Rupp win a rematch? And what of Western Kentucky, Minnesota and Oklahoma A&M, some of the other powerhouse programs of the era?
“It was a case of thinking up ideas to develop interest,” Alan J. Gould, then the sports editor for The Associated Press, explained years later. “Sports was then living off controversy, opinion, whatever. This was just another exercise in hoopla.”
Gould had dreamed up the AP college football poll in 1936, when he asked newspaper editors across the country to rank teams each week. But it wasn't until 1949 that the AP followed suit by ranking the top 20 teams in men's basketball (it would be another 28 years before the AP had a women's basketball poll).
The poll has evolved over the years, contracting to 10 for a period in the 1960s before expanding to its now-familiar Top 25 for the 1989-90 season. The panel of newspaper editors that voted on it has likewise expanded to include digital outlet beat writers along with radio and TV personalities. And these days, box scores and game stories are supplemented by the fact that nearly every game is broadcast, whether that be on television, a streaming service or somewhere else across the internet.
Some things have not changed, though, including the nuts-and-bolts of how the poll works.
Each season, the AP selects a panel of more than 60 college basketball experts from across the country to vote on the Top 25. Four are considered “national writers" while the rest are chosen to represent each state, and much like the Electoral College, states that have the most Division I programs have the largest share of voters. The goal is geographic diversity so good teams everywhere get the attention they deserve.
The poll is not a factor in determining a champion. The final ballots are released the day after Selection Sunday, on the eve of the NCAA Tournament that settles the ultimate question of which team is the best in the land.
On each ballot, teams receive an inverted number of points based on position: The top team on a ballot gets 25 points, the second-ranked team receives 24 and so on. The cumulated point total determines the Top 25, which is released on Mondays.
“It's a lot more art than science,” explained Seth Davis, a college basketball analyst for CBS and longtime AP voter. “It’s our job to watch as much as we can, keep track of all the scores, consume all the data and make our best subjective assessment.”
The notion of subjectivity is essential to the Top 25. Voters understand there is no room for biases, and given that individual ballots are made public each week, they also know their opinions may come under intense scrutiny.
In fact, one longtime voter remembers a time that he was certain West Virginia fans had organized “a letter-writing campaign” against him for his placement of the Mountaineers. Another said, almost certainly tongue-in-cheek, that he receives “nothing but effusive praise for each and every one of the decisions I make each week.”
Social media, for better or worse, has made it even easier for fans to interact with AP voters, taking their spirited conversations from water coolers to the internet. But the poll still drives discussion, just like it was intended to do 75 years ago.
“The poll has always been a fun talking point," said Jerry Tipton, who retired in 2022 after more than four decades of covering Kentucky for the Lexington Herald-Leader. “It puts the sport out there, helps to promote it. And it gets people talking."
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