Changes in voter bias in the associated press college football poll

ABSTRACT

We evaluate whether biases found in the 2007 Associated Press poll have persisted. Data from the 2018 and 2019 pre-COVID Football Bowl Subdivision seasons show that geographic and recency biases have diminished. However, AP pollsters during 2018–19 appear to have favoured even more disproportionately Notre Dame and the teams from the five so-called Power-5 conferences than they did in 2007.

KEYWORDS:

• discrimination
• voting
• group decisions
• football
• polling bias

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• L83

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Some alma mater data were collected through direct communication with voters. All other data are from public domain sources as cited within the references and/or available online.

Notes

¹ Included were the rankings of Ashburn, Bassett, Bihl, Billingsley, Congrove, Coffey, Colley, Dolphin, and Wolfe (Massey 2021).