College Gameday Host Omits Wisconsin Football From AP Ballot

The Week 2 AP Poll has been released and the Wisconsin football team stayed put at No. 19 after a win over Buffalo. I thought with a few of the teams ahead of them losing, they would move up a little bit. But no dice.

Outside of Wisconsin, there was plenty of movement. North Carolina (17) and Oklahoma (18) both jumped Wisconsin. The Tar Heels and Sooners were 21 and 20 last week, respectfully.

Behind the Badgers are the Ole Miss Rebels, who received 379 points, and the Duke Blue Devils, who got 343 points after their big win over Clemson.

Duke made a big leap from the preseason poll to the Week 2 poll. In the preseason poll, the Blue Devils had just two top-25 votes, one at 23 and one at 25. This week, however, they appeared in a ballot as high as No. 9, from Audrey Dahlgren, out of Lansing, Michigan.

College Poll Tracker gives us an inside look at all of the AP ballots and where each voter put each team. Let’s take a look at how Wisconsin remained No. 19.

How Do the Voters View the Wisconsin Football Team After One Week?

The Wisconsin football team did technically improve. In the preseason poll, the Wisconsin football team received 386 points. In the Week 2 poll, they received 407 total points from the voters. Ahead of the Badgers are North Carolina and Oklahoma, as previously stated. The Tar Heels received 551 points and the Sooners got 426. So the Heels are well ahead of Wisconsin while the Sooners are within striking distance.

Looking at the breakdown of the voting for the Badgers, they appeared as high as No. 12 on a ballot Steve Wiseman, a beat writer for Duke.

Here is the breakdown of where the Badgers received votes at each position:

12: 1 vote

15: 3 votes

16: 8 votes

17: 9 votes

18: 4 votes

19: 6 votes

20: 7 votes

21: 7 votes

22: 6 votes

23: 5 votes

24: 4 votes

25: 1 vote

NR: 2

The voting is pretty consistent. A majority of the votes fall between 19 and 24, which isn’t a surprise based on where they were last week and how they looked against Buffalo.

The two voters who did not put Wisconsin football into their top 25 ballots are Greg Madia, from The Daily Progress out of Charlottesville, VA, and ESPN’s Rece Davis.

If Rece Davis’ name is familiar, it’s because he is the host of ESPN’s college football pregame show, College Gameday.

Obviously, every voter has a reason for their picks. But I think what irks me is that Davis has some very interesting picks ahead of Wisconsin in his latest ballot. He has Colorado up at 19, Wyoming at 23 (he was the only one to give Wyoming a vote), and Texas State at 25.

To me, this is Davis being a prisoner of the moment. They all won as underdogs and they are trendy picks, especially Colorado.

He also put Florida State as his No. 1 team after they beat LSU. To me, this pick feels like an overreaction as well.

College Poll Tracker also tracks biases towards and against certain teams. In order for there to be a bias attached to a voter, there needs to be a trend and multiple points of data that show a voter is ‘biased’ towards or against teams.

According to CPT, Davis has a bias against Wisconsin football. That bias is on there because Davis has ranked Wisconsin eight spots below average over the past eight weeks that he’s voted. To make matters worse for Badgers fans, he has a bias towards Minnesota, ranking them five spots above the average over his last seven weeks of voting.

Now, does he personally have a bias against Wisconsin? Probably not. But this algorithm shows that he hasn’t given the Badgers a whole lot of credit lately.

Time will tell, but for now, the Wisconsin football team is still being slept on by some, including those in the national media.

Contact/Follow us @Badger_Notes on Twitter, Subscribe to the BadgerNotes Newsletter here, and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Wisconsin Badgers football news, notes, opinions, and analysis. You can also follow Christian Borman on Twitter @ChristianBorman

Follow this link and use promo code: BADGERNOTES for 25% off your next True Classic order.

Join the Badger Notes watch party and stream Wisconsin Badgers games by following this link.

*Subscribe to BadgerNotes After Dark on Youtube and wherever you find podcasts, the official Wisconsin Badgers podcast of the Big Banter Sports Network.