The Ranking
What is this?
Think of an average week in the AP Poll, in which 60 or so sportswriters vote on a weekly basis to name the top 25 teams in the country.
To do this, each voter submits an individual top-25 ballot that is scored such that each listed team receives a point value that is the inverse of their ranking (#1 gets 25 points, #2 gets 24 points, etc., all the way down to 1 point for #25). Those scores for every team are then added up across every ballot and the top 25 vote-getters get the little number next to their name on the scorebug.
The All-Time AP Poll runs the same calculations on the broadest possible scale by treating every weekly poll as an individual ballot in the all-time ranking. The men’s basketball AP Poll debuted on January 18, 1949, and has released 1309 weekly rankings, so this is quite a lot of data that covers the wide majority of the sport’s history as a major entity. Think of this as a sort of all-time program ranking—one that you can follow on a week-by-week basis!
What do the columns mean?
- Chg: The change in a school’s ranking from the previous week
- FPV: The number of weeks a school has been ranked #1 on the AP Poll—short for “First Place Votes”, simulating the actual AP Poll
- Ballots: The number of weeks a school has been ranked anywhere on the AP Poll—named to simulate the actual AP Poll
- Cur: The school’s ranking in the most recent AP Poll
Ties are broken first by Ballots, then by FPV, and finally—should it come down to it—alphabetically.
For more information, check out this video. It’s a couple years old, so the numbers are out of date, but it explains everything in much more detail.
Who’s never been ranked?
Of the 365 current Division I schools, 168 (46.0%) have never been ranked in the AP Poll.
Below is every member of the Never Been AP Ranked Club.
Eli Powell 