Ask An AP Top 25 College Football Poll Voter

In What’s Becoming an Annual Tradition, Fox 8 New Orleans Sports Reporter/AP Poll Voter/Friend of the Blog Garland Gillen Spoke With FTB About His Preseason Rankings on the Eve of Monday’s Release

Sponsor: For The Blogy’s preseason coverage is sponsored by FANATICS. Gear up for College Football season with Nike’s 2021 Penn State sideline collection of polos, t-shirts, hats, pullovers and more right HERE.

*Each FANATICS purchase helps support For The Blogy.

 

FTB: No need to beat around the bush here…did you rank Penn State?

GG: I actually don’t have them ranked, and it’s largely due to their quarterback play. Not that impressed with a lot of the quarterback play in the Big Ten, to be honest. I know Penn State rebounded from an 0-5 start and finished the second half of the season blazing, but that doesn’t erase a preseason Top 10 team starting 0-5. I think a lot of this season falls on Sean Clifford – when he protected the ball, Penn State won; when he turned the ball over, they lost. So you have a guy who was up-and-down last season, and now the backups aren’t experienced after Will Levis transferred to Kentucky, so that security blanket is gone. I know (James) Franklin is killing it in recruiting, so that bodes well for the future, but obviously those guys are a year away from being on the roster.

Now, with all that said, I have Wisconsin ranked No. 13 in my preseason poll. If Penn State goes to Madison and beats Wisconsin, then yeah they’re in the next week. Firmly in. Nothing is written in stone. After Week 1, my preseason poll could be flipped upside-down. We won’t have to wait long to see where Penn State stands.

FTB: If feels like the gap between Ohio State and the rest of the Big Ten is widening. How big is that gap in your preseason poll?

GG: I have Ohio State No. 2. The next Big Ten team in my poll is Wisconsin at No. 13. Iowa then comes in at No. 17. And then, Indiana at No. 23. Those are the four teams I have ranked from the Big Ten in my AP poll. In the recent past, you always had Penn State or Michigan bridging that gap between Ohio State and the rest of the conference, and you don’t have that this year.

FTB: Do you approach your preseason Top 25 poll differently than your week-to-week in-season poll?

GG: Yeah, it’s all wins and losses once the season starts. For the first poll, it’s more projection – who do you have coming back, returning production at key positions how did you finish last season, who transferred in? So you’re projecting, and that’s something you don’t do once the season starts.

FTB: How often are you presented with tough choices on where to rank teams, and are there certain philosophies you’ve used in the past to separate teams that appear equal on paper?

GG: Filling out No. 21 to No. 25 is really difficult some weeks because I’ll give those slots just as much attention as I give ranking 1 through 5. As a voter, you owe it to those teams because for a lot of programs just making the Top 25, seeing your school printed in that poll, is a big deal. You look at Liberty, Coastal Carolina, Louisiana. Those are schools I have in my preseason Top 20 and schools that might be ranked when the poll comes out Monday. And if they are, that’s a huge accomplishment.

As far as separating teams – whether they should be No. 17 or No. 18, for example — I’m based in the South, SEC Country. I also think the SEC is the best conference in America, so if there’s a 50-50 between two teams and one of them happens to be in the SEC, that’s usually the tiebreaker I’ll use. But if you look at my past polls, the non-Power 5 is well represented. Buffalo last year. Ball State last year. Sun Belt schools.

FTB: This is your 12th year as an AP Top 25 voter. In that time, how have you evolved as a voter and do you think you’re a better voter today than you were Year 1?

GG: You know, around Year 3 or Year 4 I made the decision that no matter what I GOT to get my poll in Saturday night. Doesn’t matter if I’m covering a night game at LSU or wherever – I’m turning in my poll that night. It’s fresh in my head, you’ve consumed college football all day, it’s been your entire focus for 15 hours. Even though your poll isn’t due until late Sunday morning, I’ll stay up until 2 a.m. and do my rankings before I go to sleep that night.

Also, because your individual rankings are public, there’s a lot of negativity that comes with where you put teams. I tune that out now. I don’t even care anymore. A lot of these sites will put your Twitter handle and your work email out there, and back in the day I’d go back and forth with those people who popped in my Inbox trying to justify why I voted the way that I did. But, hey, I’m 44 years old now. They love you one week, they hate you the next. And the people who hate you one week, love you the next. So what can you do?

FTB: Do you have an artificial ceiling or basement on how high or low you’ll rank teams from one week to the next?

GG: No limits. I’ll put a rocketship on a team if they upset the No. 1 team in America. Or if you’re No. 10 in the country and you have a disastrous loss to a team you had no business losing to, I’ll drop you all the way out of the poll. I have noticed that some weeks, after a big upset, (voters) will only drop a team eight or nine spots so that they don’t drop out of the poll, but I don’t do that. My poll is always fluid. For a hypothetical, say my preseason No. 12 suffers an embarrassing loss in Week 1, then I’ll get them out of there the next week. I’m not going to just keep them in because they’re a brand name or I had them ranked highly in my preseason poll. Like I said, once the season starts it’s wins and losses. It’s results.

FTB: When the poll comes out on Monday, what team in YOUR Top 25 do you expect you’ll have ranked much higher than everybody else?

GG: I’ll give you two, both from the Sun Belt – Coastal Carolina at No. 12 and Louisiana at No. 14. I’m high on the Sun Belt. You look at Louisiana, and they have a real chance to walk in Austin Week 1 and disrupt the national college football landscape. Louisiana is a veteran team with a “super senior” 6th-year quarterback in Levi Lewis, who has thrown for 6,000 yards in his career, going into a venue with a new coach and an unsettled quarterback situation. So I’m extremely high on the Ragin’ Cajuns. Coastal Carolina has an excellent coach who has built a culture of success, which you saw come to fruition last year. So they’re a team that I could see finishing in the Top 10 and landing in a New Year’s 6 bowl game.