UCF’s AP vote tallies were all over the board, sometimes downright silly
The vote tallies behind how UCF ended up sixth shows an AP voting public all over the map.
Shortly after Monday’s National Championship game, the final AP Top 25 of the college football season was released. UCF, despite going 13-0 and beating SEC Champ Auburn in the Peach Bowl finished sixth.
It was the first time since 2009 that an undefeated team did not finish in first place. One of the only reason the Knights finished even that high is because they managed to pull four first-place votes away from playoff winner and faux national champion, Alabama.
When first looking at that number, the knee-jerk reaction is to think that all four of the first place votes came from AP writers in Nebraska (current and hopefully permanent home of Scott Frost), and Orlando (Frost’s former home and home of UCF).
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If you thought that’s where all the votes were coming from, you’d be half right. Sam McKewon, from the Omaha World-Herald and Safid Deen from the Orlando Sentinel both voted UCF as the National Champions.
Interestingly, the other two votes came from Ryan Aber from the Oklahoman and Ed Daigneault from the Republican-America which is a paper out of Connecticut. It’s somewhat reassuring that there was support in other parts of the country for what Scott Frost did at UCF.
Only getting four first-place votes is only half the story. The other half is the laughable positions some of these AP voters held. That includes Ross Dellenger who writes for Lousiana newspaper, The Advocate.
Dellenger was really not a believer in what the Knights did this season, considering he voted them 9th. That’s bad enough. The fact that he had 11-3 TCU ahead of them seems like one of those “take away his voting rights” kind of bad decisions.
Then there’s Soren Petro, who cast the worst vote on record this year. Petro, from Sports Radio 810 WHB out of Kansas City not only had UCF ranked 10th in his final poll, he had Auburn ranked ahead of them. I’ll just leave that here so you can allow it to sink in.