Breaking News:Tennessee football inside the Top 20 in most recent polls.
Which college football program can legitimately claim to be the best?
Think about it for a moment, and all the ways one could use in attempting to answer that question. Would it just be national championships? How about coaching prowess? Players in the NFL? Hall of Fame inductees? Major Awards? All-Americans? The list goes on and on. Perhaps that’s the best thing about the sport, there’s always room for debate because wins and losses never tell the whole story.
One of best indicators of success are the polls, which deservingly drawing criticism for having voting before a single game is played and then can be slow to adjust, But there’s not too much complaining about the final poll held after every game has been completed.
Years ago, former Southeastern Conference assistant director of media relations Charles Woodruff came up with the idea creating a compiled ranking of every season-ending AP poll, based on the same methodology as the weekly rankings. Just like how each ballot was counted, with each week in the media-based poll based on points with the first-place team getting 25, the second team 24, and so on down, the all-time poll does likewise with each year’s final results.
The SEC used to include the rankings in the back of the annual media guide back when it was trying to make the case that the conference was the best in the sport. Now there’s pretty much no doubt, with only the Big Ten able to make a challenge. But I’ve continued to update the rankings each year going back to one my first books
