There are three major college football polls — and, you might not be aware, but James Franklin has a weekly vote in one of them: the US LBM Coaches Poll, administered by USA Today and a voting contingent comprised of current major college football coaches.
The other two: The more-well-known weekly Associated Press poll, which originated in 1936 and whose 62 voters are sportswriters and broadcasters, and the College Football Playoff rankings.
The CFP rankings are the ones that really matter — and those rankings have not even started yet. The CFP rankings on Selection Sunday, Dec. 8, will determine who gets into the initial 12-team playoffs. That 13-member committee is comprised of coaches, former players, college administrators and journalists, along with sitting athletics directors, headed by Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel. Full roster is here
The CFP’s first rankings of 2024 come out on Tuesday, Nov. 5 — three days after the Penn State-Ohio State game, slated for noon, Saturday, Nov. 2, on FOX.
This week, Penn State (6-0) is ranked No. 3 in the AP and the Coaches polls. Oregon (7-0) is No. 1, Georgia (6-1) is No. 2 and Ohio State (5-1) is No. 4 in both polls.
COACHES POLL
About that Coaches poll: It is conducted by a panel of 55 head coaches at Football Bowl Subdivision schools. The panel is chosen by random draw, conference by conference plus independents, from a pool of coaches who have indicated to the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) their willingness to participate. Each coach submits a Top 25, with a first-place vote worth 25 points, second place 24, and so on down to one point for 25th. Since 1950, the AFCA has conducted a weekly Top 20/Top 25 poll during the college football season, and for several decades it was done in partnership with the now-defunct United Press International.
And what is a US LBM? It is a national distributor of specialty building materials, with 450 locations. US LBM is the title sponsor of the Coaches poll and a major sponsor of the AFCA. The Coaches poll is published weekly during the college football season and is released every Sunday around 1 p.m. Eastern, an hour before the AP poll is made public.
Of the voting coaches in the 2024 Coaches poll, 26 are from the Power Four and Notre Dame. The breakdown: seven from the ACC, six from the Big Ten, six from the SEC, six from the Big 12 and one from Notre Dame. The Big Ten voters are: Franklin, David Braun (Northwestern), Ryan Day (Ohio State), Jedd Fisch (Washington), Dan Lanning (Oregon) and Mike Locksley (Maryland).
WHAT FRANKLIN SAYS…AND DOES
At his regular Monday press conference, I asked Franklin — who is a member of the AFCA Board of Trustees — about his process for voting and what his strategy is for voting on his own team. Here is what he had to say:
The Process — “It doesn’t vary a whole lot,” Franklin said. “Basically, I think Sunday mornings, [the poll ballot] has to be in, I think, by 12 o’clock. Michael Hazel used to put this together for us. Now Will Reimann does that. He puts it together for us.”
Hazel, who worked with Franklin at both Vanderbilt and Penn State, was senior director of operations under Franklin at PSU. Hazel is in his third season at Virginia Tech as associate athletic director/chief of staff for head football coach Brent Pry, the former longtime defensive coordinator for the Nittany Lions.
At Penn State, Reimann is the current director of football research and strategy. He was an assistant coach under Joe Moorhead at Fordham, then was an analyst for a season under Moorhead at Penn State in 2017-18. From there, Reimann followed Moorhead to Mississippi State, then returned to Penn State in January 2020.
Franklin continued, as he shared the tools at his disposal as he constructs his vote: “We typically have the AP poll last week, the Coaches poll and then how we voted last week. They’re usually always pretty consistent for the most part, to be honest with you. I look at that, and then I look at whoever lost that week, whoever won that week that was in the top 25, who should come out of the top 25 [and] who should go into the top 25 based on the previous weeks.”
Franklin’s Favorites — “I’m also a big proponent of the power conferences, just based on the competition that they play week-in and week-out and the challenges that come with that. But for the most part it’s very, very similar to what you see out there publicly. There’s very little differences between the AP poll, the Coaches poll and our poll that we put out every single week.
How Franklin Votes on PSU — “We’re the same way; we look at everybody else. Typically, again, it’s pretty consistent, right? I think all three of us had it ranked exactly the same way this past week. There’s sometimes where Penn State is voted lower than what other maybe publications have us ranked, and there’s a few times where we’ve been ranked a little bit higher. Obviously, it all comes out in the averages.”
