The College Football Polls (A true story)

by John Fricke
Fox Sports Net
page 2

ESPN VS. CNN SPORTS "CREDIBILITY IN 25 LITTLE BUNCHES"

In the mid 1980's ESPN (still a somewhat small sports network) decided that it could attain a certain amount of pull if it launched its own "top 20". The people in Bristol believed that they could garner some attention from print media and establish a "3rd major college poll." The ESPN Top-20 didn't last long.

We in Atlanta took note of ESPN's move and countered (is anything in TV really new?). Rick Davis was my boss at the time (and still one of the most clever sports producers you'd ever meet). His view was that we ought to do our own poll and add to that get instant print access by linking the poll to this brand new little newspaper called USA Today. Good move.

And now comes the blame. If anything I can be shot for in my career it is this. I went to Rick a day or two after the announcement of the linking of the paper and CNN. I told him I had an idea to get us additonal coverage. Whenever I went to a college game they would always list the rankings in the pre-game notes. Announcers would use these on the air... writers would put them in the papers, etc. I asked "who wrote the rule down that you can only rank 20 teams?". I explained to Rick that if we expanded our poll to 25 teams then we would have a number of advantages over AP, UPI and ESPN. The first being that we would now rank 5 additional school that might otherwise be unranked (then they would talk about that... "hey CNN ranked us why can't the A.P. give us any love?"). The second advantage was that we might rank teams that otherwise would always be 'bubble' teams in the other polls. Take a MAC team like Western Michigan.. rank them in a national paper and on a national cable network and let them talk about it to death in Kalamazoo. The final immediate advantage was that we could claim that we were the only ones with 25 teams and it gave us a "hook" that no other "Top 20" had at the time.

Rick agreed, USA Today agreed and the poll was launched. And the first week out we had the first ever game of a team ranked #22 playing a team ranked #25. We were blasted in the papers (shock, since they wouldn't want anyone creeping into their area of 'expertise') for such a "silly concoction". Problem for them was, it worked. Fast. (continued on next page)