States With Multiple Football Teams in the AP Top 25
With WSU beating Oregon and UW beating UC Berkeley, the State of Washington is poised to have two football teams in the top ten of NCAA Division I football rankings. Naturally this got me thinking, how often does this happen and how many states have had this same achievement?
To answer this I used the weekly results of Associated Press poll which started in 1936 and thanks to our good friends at Wikipedia, I was able to get AP Poll results for every week.
I found that 25 states had at least one week where two teams from that state were in the AP Poll. However, the more I thought about it the more I realized this was slightly biased because some states might only have one team (i.e. Wyoming) while other states might have two Division I teams that are never both great at the same time (i.e. Montana). I tightened down my restrictions a bit and only looked at the top 10 teams from each AP Poll.
Surprisingly, of the 25 states with at least two teams in the AP top 25 Poll, 21 of those states had a week with at least two teams from that state in the AP top 10. I made a summary table with the most recent year each state achieved this distinction listed:
| state | year |
|---|---|
| Louisiana | 1936 |
| Maryland | 1955 |
| North Carolina | 1957 |
| New York | 1958 |
| Illinois | 1963 |
| Indiana | 1979 |
| Pennsylvania | 1982 |
| Colorado | 1994 |
| Kansas | 1995 |
| Washington | 1997 |
| Ohio | 2009 |
| Oregon | 2012 |
| Florida | 2013 |
| South Carolina | 2013 |
| Georgia | 2014 |
| Mississippi | 2014 |
| California | 2015 |
| Alabama | 2016 |
| Michigan | 2016 |
| Texas | 2016 |
| Oklahoma | 2017 |
Then, I thought what if there were ever a week when a state had 3 teams in the AP top 10. Sure enough, four states have achieved this:
| state | year |
|---|---|
| California | 1952 |
| Indiana | 1967 |
| Florida | 2005 |
| Texas | 2015 |
As always, all of my code for this is on GitHub