Outrageous: KU football isn’t in the AP Top 25 despite undefeated record | Opinion

Kansas (University of) didn’t make the Top 25 in the AP football poll.

And while I can’t say I’m surprised, I can say I’m outraged.

What does KU have to do to get there?

Obviously, opening the season undefeated at 4-0 isn’t enough.

Neither is holding the lead in the Big 12, one of college football’s “Power 5” conferences.

Nor is beating not one, but two Power 5 teams, including previously undefeated Duke on Saturday.

At this writing, there are four Big 12 teams in the Top 25:

▪ Oklahoma State at No. 9, with a record of 3-0.

▪ Baylor, No. 16, 3-1 with a loss to Brigham Young University.

▪ Oklahoma, No. 18, 3-1 after Saturday’s loss to Kansas State.

▪ Kansas State, No. 25, 3-1, who upset Oklahoma on Saturday but also lost to Tulane, a 2-10 team last year in a non-power conference.

Now, there’s a lot of football to be played and I’m not saying that Kansas is the best of the bunch.

But by performance on the field, at least at this point in the season, Kansas deserves to be in the Top 25 conversation.

Instead, AP pollsters rank them as the top team in “also receiving votes.”

Part of it is the way that the AP poll is structured.

Basically, a select group of about 60 sportswriters who cover Division I college football fill out a ballot each week ranking who they think are the best 25 teams in the country.

The sportswriters are selected based on the number of Division 1 teams per state, so the panel is dominated by voters from the East Coast and upper Midwest.

According to www.collegepolltracker.com, 42 of 62 sportswriters polled voted for KU to be at least No. 25. Five had them in the Top 20.

But that’s not how the poll works. A vote for the No. 1 team in the nation counts 25 points and a vote for No. 25 counts one point. And by that measure, KU is on the outside looking in.

Poll voters are supposed to be basing their decisions on on-field performance in the current season, but that’s not as easy as it sounds.

Many of the writers have their own team to cover, so they have to turn around after working their game of the week on a Saturday, and then try to figure out what’s happened across the rest of the country to file their ballot by Sunday morning.

The ranking process begins with a preseason poll, which is always dominated by big-name schools with elite football pedigrees. Once selected to the Top 25, it’s up to the rest of college football to knock them out of the rankings. It generally takes at least two losses to dislodge a name-brand program.

The preseason poll’s a joke. Last year, 13 of the preseason Top 25 weren’t in it at the end of the year.

KU has been a college football pushover for years, so they’re not getting the love they deserve based on their performance on the field this year.

And I’m not the only one thinking that on this Monday after.

CBS football analyst Tom Fornelli outlined the Jayhawks’ problems in a column titled: “Kansas serves as perfect test case to expose flaws in AP Top 25 voting process.”

“Kansas is a good football team but it isn’t supposed to be — and it’s that supposed to be part that gets them here,” Fornelli wrote. “It drives me insane because if you take Kansas’ resume and slap Penn State’s logo on it, or an SEC team like Ole Miss (which has a weaker overall resume than Kansas right now and is No. 14), it’s a top-15 team at worst. But Kansas doesn’t have those logos. It has the Kansas logo, and that’s just not good enough for voters who don’t have the time to do the research required.”

Good take Tom.

Maybe someday AP poll voters will start voting based on performance, not the laundry.