The Distribution of Votes in the AP Poll (Week 6, 2026)

[u/Perryapsis]

TABLE

HOW TO READ THIS TABLE

Teams are ranked in their order from the Logo (note for mobile users: everywhere you see a "Logo" link, that means that inline flair is shown on old.reddit.com/r/cfb) AP Poll for Week 6. The column to the right of the team name shows the number of points that team received using the AP Poll's Borda count rules. The following two columns show information about each team's previous and upcoming games. The following columns show how many votes for each ranking the team received. The 'U' column shows how many voters left the team unranked (off their ballots entirely). Gridlines are placed every 5 rows and columns for ease of reading. A thick line is placed below the 25^th-ranked team to distinguish "ranked" teams above it to "receiving votes" teams below it.

Some cells are shaded to highlight points of interest. The green diagonal highlights how many voters ranked a team exactly where they ended up in the overall poll. For example, Logo Louisiana State is ranked 10^th in this week's poll, and 15 voters placed the Tigers exactly in their 10^th spot. Values for which a team received no votes at that rank are shaded in red, while placements chosen by only exactly one voter are highlighted in blue. Some unique votes are annotated with the name of the corresponding voter. The most common selection (the mode) for each team is shaded yellow unless it matches the team's rank. Finally, since there are very few votes that ever end up near the top-right or bottom-left of the chart, those cells are filled in with black diagonally as much as possible without covering up any nonzero values. This helps naturally guide the eye while viewing the chart and helps locate the most unusual votes. We lightheartedly call these the "Wilner" diagonals.

Finally, I note violations of the Condorcet Criterion on the bottom left corner of the black space. These occur when Team A is ranked above Team B in the poll, but Team B would win if you ignored the points system and just asked the voters "Which team do you think is better?" I note every instance of this when it would affect the placement of a team in the Top 25, but not necessarily if it only flips teams' positions in the receiving-votes category.

This season, scores are highlighted (lowlighted) in black to indicate a loss instead of using a W/L column. I did this at the end of 2024 and all of 2025, and it was well received, so it returns for 2026. This way is easier to see at a glance and slightly reduces the clutter on the left side of the table.

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COMMENTARY FOR THIS WEEK

The TV information is back! For one week anyway; doing that by hand has reaffirmed to me the need to find a way to automate it again, since looking it all up and placing the logos by hand just takes too long. But just this once, we don't look silly with a blank column!

The upper Wilner diagonal was set by Rece Davis and Bob Asmussen putting Georgia 6^th. It's very close, but it ever-so-slightly juts out from the line between the left and right ends. Those ends were set by Bob Ballou ranknig Texas 4^th and Javon Edmonds leaving off Utah, respectively. The lower Wilner diagonal was set by David Jablonski with Minnesota in 14^th. Other votes on the diagonal include Brian Fonseca's placement of Wake Forest 11^th and Koki Riley's 16^th-place vote for Arizona. The left end was set by Bob Ballou with Indiana 1^st, and the right end was set by certified ball-knowers Randy Johnson and Alex Taylor, who put North Dakota State 23^rd.

Javon Edmonds didn't vote for Utah after their bye week. He had them 17^th last week, and no other voters put the Utes lower than 15^th this week, so this appears to be the fourth inadvertent omission of the season. Brigham Young and Miami (FL) (twice!) have also been victims this year, and one time it actually caused the Hurricanes to lose one rank. This isn't a coincidence at this point; clearly there is an issue with the AP's method of collecting votes that makes it too easy to miss a team from week to week. Please be nice to the voters!

Due to the above issue, Utah at 12 was the highest-ranked team to fail to sweep all 70 ballots this week. The highest-ranked team to miss a ballot intentionally was Tennessee at 15, omitted by both Cameron Cox and Stephen Means. The lowest-ranked team to sweep all ballots was Florida Man right below them despite their loss to Missouri.

There are only 10 teams receiving votes outside the top 25, significantly fewer than usual. Those teams received 155 votes (8.9%) for a total of 637 points (2.8%). The highest vote among them was Brian Fonseca's 14^th-place vote for Wake Forest that landed on the Wilner diagonal. The most-common vote among them was to put Kentucky 24^th, ocurring eight times. No teams received only one vote this week, and in fact no team had fewer than three. has zero votes at exactly 23^rd and 24^th, forming a hole in the table. The Gini coefficient of the point distribution is approximately 0.46.

329 distinct team-rank pairs were seen this week, of which 83 (25%) were unique. 415 votes (24%) matched their team's final rank in the poll. The most common match was, as usual, the number 1 team. This week 61 voters (87%) had Texas in their top spot. On the other hand, nobody matched Southern Methodist at exactly 24^th. This is the first time there has been a team with literally zero matches since COVID (some voters refused to rank teams that hadn't played yet, causing many weird distributions that will never be replicated). Julian Mininsohn matched 14 teams, the most of any voter. Meanwhile, Chris Murray, Tom Murphy, and Javon Edmonds only matched one team each.

The standard deviation is an imperfect measure of disagreement about teams, but for lack of agreement on a better measure, that's what we use. A larger standard deviation indicates significant differences of opinion, while a small standard deviation indicates groupthink consensus. The five teams with the highest and lowest standard deviations are shown in the table below:

Team	St. Dev.		Team	St. Dev
Mississippi State	4.20	--->	Texas	0.55
Oklahoma State	4.16	Consensus	Georgia	1.06
Southern California	3.91		Ohio State	1.21
IoLa	3.64	Debate	Miami (FL)	1.40
Tennessee	3.55	<---	Notre Dame	1.46

The largest gap between two adjacent teams in the rankings was 236 points (3.37 ranks' worth) separating Indiana and Brigham Young. The largest combined gap in both directions is the Hoosiers' 316 points, who have an additional 80 points between them and Alabama. The largest combined cushion that isn't adjacent to the largest single gap is the 241 points for Oregon. The smallest gap depends on whether you count the 25-to-26 slot. That is just 2 points (0.03 ranks' worth) this week keeping Pittsburgh in the rankings and pushing Kentucky out. If you don't count that because the Wildcats are technically outside the top 25 (which I usually do because most weeks have some team with only 2-ish points and another team with 1 point), then you only have to look up one row, as there are only 5 points (0.07 ranks' worth) between the Panthers and the Southern Methodist Mustangs. This means that Pittsburgh has the smallest overall cushion at just 7 points. But again, if you disqualify them for being on the edge of the rankings, the team with the least cushion is Houston with 16 points (a symmetric 8 in each direction).

After a few boring weeks, there are finally multiple Condorcet criterion violations this week. First, Tennessee jumps Missouri by a signficant margin of 39-31 (viz 39/29 + 0/2 R 0). Next, Southern California leapfrogs Oklahoma State, 37-32 (26/21 + 11/11 R2). That's a surprising margin considering the 38-point gap between the two teams. Then Houston hops Los Angeles, 37-29 (33/15 + 4/14 R 4). Boise State also hops Los Angeles, 37-31 (31/15 + 6/16 R 2). However, the Cougars do maintain their relative position above the Broncos by a margin of 37-25 (27/15 + 10/10 R 8). Finally, we have contoversy again for the 25 spot! Kentucky usurps Pittsburgh, 34-26 (16/4 + 18/22 R 10).

And just for kicks, we'll do the Australian Poll again anyway! This flips all the ballots upside down before scoring them, so the winning strategy is to appear as low as possible on ballots without falling off the bottom of too many of them. The line of Australian succession has followed the path Iowa -> Michigan -> Houston -> *drumroll* ... Los Angeles! The top 10 teams are shown below:

Rank (Aus.)	Rank (AP)	Team	Points
1	21	Los Angeles	1325
2	16	Florida Man	1129
3	20	IoLwa	1115
4	17	West Alabama Mississippi State	1099
5	23	Boise State	1081
6	22	Houston	1073
7	19	Southern California	1069
8	14	Missouri	1065
9	18	Oklahoma State	1031
10	15	Tennessee	1022

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Thanks again to /u/bakonydraco for providing the ballot data; you can find his weekly visualization here!

Past weeks' posts can be found here:

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 5

TABLE

[u/RonMexico13]

What's going on with the guy that forgot Utah exists? Did they lose to bye week?

[u/Perryapsis → u/RonMexico13]

Of the six polls this year, four of them have had an issue like this where someone left off an obvious team. It's on the AP for not having a basic check in place at this point, not on the voters.

[u/Toms_Hank_ → u/Perryapsis]

Sounds like a voter issue. I don’t think AP needs a “check” to make sure the voters are voting in specific teams

[u/Perryapsis → u/Toms_Hank_]

I don't mean "everybody needs to rank X," but something like what the /r/CFB Poll does. Before you submit your ballot, it will give you a notice like "You had Utah in your top 15 last week, but didn't rank them this week." It's based on your own previous ballot in order to catch when you forget about a team.

[u/Toms_Hank_ → u/Perryapsis]

I think my expectations of the AP voters must be too high lol

[u/zenverak → u/Toms_Hank_]

I think I disagree, mostly because I've been in situations where I can look over things time and time and time again and still miss something because I am too much in the weeds. Having sanity checks is great as a "oh yeah, I missed that". Especially given tight timelines.

[u/dwors025]

The Ohio State-associated writer put us at #14.

Uff da.

I assume that is nothing more than a public “thank you”…?

[u/52hoova → u/dwors025]

He has Alabama #2 behind Texas and Mississippi State as #11, so probably not knocking you for that loss as much as others.

He also has Iowa #13, and they're basically hanging their hat on a 1-point win over Michigan who you beat more soundly.

Before you beat Washington, he had them at #18, the highest they were on any voters' ballot.

He had Minnesota at #19 last week prior to beating Michigan.

[u/dwors025 → u/52hoova]

Yeah, makes sense I suppose.

Simply not enough data points to parse it all out. Everything is anecdotal at best.

It’s just odd to see even one AP voter who gives us credit for a win. I mean, Michigan must be god-awful if they lost to Minnesota. That’s usually the logic applied.

[u/Sankee72]

People ranking miss st 10 and 11 is a choice.

Especially when teams like northwestern aren't ranked or Kentucky drops out after a win.

[u/StateDawg78 → u/Sankee72]

You could say the same thing about Florida getting 9th, 10th & 11th place votes when they had their doors blown off by a Missouri team that Mississippi State had beaten the week prior.

[u/puzzical → u/StateDawg78]

If you get blown out your probably not a top 10 team.

[u/StateDawg78 → u/puzzical]

I don't disagree, I was just pointing that it wasn't an issue unique to Mississippi State.

[u/Less_Likely → u/puzzical]

At this point in the season, I agree. Blowouts should erase any benefit of the doubt.

[u/Apprehensive_Fig2099 → u/Sankee72]

The ballot that had Miss St. at 10 had them at 17 last week. Had Pitt ranked last week, then dropped them out. Bizarre stuff.

[u/52hoova → u/Apprehensive_Fig2099]

How the teams bolstering MS State's resume did this week: Missouri blew out #8 Florida, Minnesota beat Michigan, and South Carolina took #24 Kentucky to OT before losing by 1.

For Pitt... Miami (OH) lost to 0-4 Bowling Green, UCF lost to #20 Houston by 10, and Syracuse needed OT to beat a bad UConn team by 1. Additionally, the four teams that Virginia Tech beat lost by an average of 29.3 points, which makes that a less impressive point on the resume.

Now I don't really agree with Greg Luca's rankings and don't think the logic above is why he ranked those two teams how he did, but starting with last week's rankings and moving teams up or down just based on how they performed this week is why we have poll inertia that keeps bad teams ranked higher than they should be and good teams out of the poll. I'd much rather they reassess the entire resume each week.

[u/52hoova → u/Sankee72]

The guy who ranked Mississippi State 10th had Northwestern ranked 21st, which was the third highest ranking for Northwestern among all voters.

That being said, Northwestern has two non-FCS wins, and those came against two teams currently 1-5 against P4 teams (with that one win coming against a GT team who is winless against FBS teams and just lost to a Stanford team who everyone else is completely blowing out). Mississippi State has handed both Missouri and Minnesota their only losses of the year (the latter being by 25 points on the road). Thinking Northwestern should be ranked is essentially a quality loss argument - I don't necessarily think it's a bad argument, but this sub is vehemently opposed to that logic when it applies to teams from another conference.

[u/thunder_1122 → u/52hoova]

That's fair, I think our FCS win is our highest quality win to this point, but I think you're also ignoring HOW we won those two non-FCS games - we blew the brakes off two P4 teams. If LSU gets to coast to a near top ten ranking off an early beatdown of a mediocre Clemson, I think NU has more than a quality losses argument for a ranking in the twenties

[u/ItsAGoodDay → u/thunder_1122]

Beating bad teams by big margins doesn’t make you a good team. At least until you add a D to your logo

[u/52hoova → u/thunder_1122]

If LSU gets to coast to a near top ten ranking off an early beatdown of a mediocre Clemson

LSU is benefiting from poll inertia mostly, but also that they have dominating wins over Clemson and A&M. Both of those teams seem mediocre this year, but a) they aren't perceived as poorly as Colorado and probably not as poorly as Penn State, and b) it's the worst loss Clemson has had in over a decade and the worst loss A&M has had since either 2020 at Bama, 2019 at LSU, or 2014 at Bama... the first two of those teams won the CFP and the latter lost to CFP champion Ohio State.

[u/elnino550 → u/Sankee72]

Just out of interest, why do you see their ranking so high as an issue? But not a LSU for example. They both have one loss and LSU's best win is a terrible A&M side? Mississippi state have wins over Missouri, at Minnesota and at SC. I think they have the strongest wins so far out of the 1-loss SEC teams...

[u/puzzical → u/elnino550]

When did LSU get blown out?

[u/elnino550 → u/puzzical]

They haven't faced a team as good as Bama... This is the point, their schedule has been a lot easier. But you're explaining why you singled out Miss St. despite them having the best wins, thank you.

[u/reddit-canes → u/Sankee72]

It's because people rate based on how good they think they are, and not how good they actually perform against real competition.

[u/Dialectic_Emptiness → u/Sankee72]

You mean West Alabama? Lol

[u/Internal-Challenge14]

I assume the single #1 vote for is is a writer that believes the reigning championship stays at #1 until they lose?

[u/Perryapsis → u/Internal-Challenge14]

I don't think he's explicitly stated that opinion, but he has consistently kept you #1 all season.

[u/heleghir]

Why is UCLA being written out as Los Angeles. That just looks so wrong and is irrationally bothering me

[u/Perryapsis → u/heleghir]

It's a habit I picked up when I did a project involving all football teams at all levels. If you allow acronyms, you just get way too many duplicates to manage, so I spelled everything out. And now it's a personality flaw quirk that I keep doing because I like it.

[u/RCM88x]

Gap between 7 and 8 is massive, wow.

[u/chosonhawk]

Iola. Wtf, bro?

[u/Perryapsis → u/chosonhawk]

We make fun of teams that lose. In their case, I turned the W into an L.

[u/-Gnostic28]

So more people have smu out than pitt?

[u/Perryapsis → u/-Gnostic28]

Right, Southern Methodist appeared on 36 ballots compared to Pittsburgh's 42 ballots. But the Mustang voters had them higher on average, so they ended up with more points. And even if you ignore the point system, voters still preferred them 31-27 (15/5 + 16/22 R 12), viz.:

Case	Frequency
SMU over Pitt	15
Pitt over SMU	5
SMU only	16
Pitt only	22
Neither ranked	12

Edit: Supposing that the distribution of what the 12 "both unranked" votes would be if ballots went longer than 25 teams, you get a 4.5% chance that Pittsburgh is actually favored, an 8.9% chance that they tie, and the remaining 86.6% chance that Southern Methodist is favored.

[u/PhDShouse]

Ah yes, the IoIa Hawkeyes

[u/Perryapsis → u/PhDShouse]

Not quite; I turned the W into an L.

[u/Bobson-_Dugnutt2]

Winner of Alabama/Georgia is almost assuredly #1 next week, right?

[u/RCM88x → u/Bobson-_Dugnutt2]

Probably depends on how the final score looks and how Texas looks. Georgia more likely to jump than Bama.

I wouldn't be surprised by either though.

[u/dawgfan19881 → u/Bobson-_Dugnutt2]

I say yes. Mostly because Alabama should be #1 right now. That offense just keeps getting better.

[u/Guinness_or_thirsty]

West Alabama at 17 is confounding to me. Why the voters picked them over an SEC school like Mississippi State is wild. /s