Oklahoma football: Sooners tied for top spot as Coaches Poll all-time No. 1

Several years back, when the first All-Time Associated Press College Football Poll came out, Oklahoma football was ranked No. 2 behind top-ranked Ohio State.

Since then, Alabama has taken over the top spot in the All-Time AP Top 25. Oklahoma remains No, 2 and Ohio State has dropped down to No, 3.

Now there is a Coaches Poll counterpart to the AP All-Time Poll. The editors of College Football News have issued a Coaches Poll All-Time College Football Top 25.

Oklahoma and Ohio State are tied as the Coaches Poll All-Time No. 1 team with Alabama claiming the No, 3 spot. There is a wide gap between the Sooners, Buckeyes and Crimson Tide and the No, 4 all-time team, Michigan.

At first glance, you would think that the two all-time top-25 rankings would be the same, given that they both applied the same measurement formula. But there are two distinct differences between the two national ranking services.

First and the most obvious is the length of time the AP and Coaches polls have been in existence. The second is, beginning in 1974, the Coaches Poll stopped including teams that are on probation.

The first year for the Associated Press Poll was 1936. The Coaches Poll was introduced 14 years later, in 1950, starting out as the UPI (United Press International) Coaches Poll.

The man credited with conceiving and compiling the first All-Time AP College Football Poll is Charles Woodroof, a former SEC assistant director of media relations. His methodology for putting together the all-time rankings was to take all of the final AP rankings, beginning with the very first year the AP began ranking the national top college teams, and assign a numbering system. A No, 1 ranking was worth 25 points, second place 24 points and so forth.

The AP rankings have not always been 25 teams, however. For the first 26 years (1936-1961) it was 20 teams. From 1962-’67 only 10 teams made up the rankings. The rankings expanded to 25 teams in 1968 and it’s been that way ever since.

The Coaches Poll All-Time Top 25 also assigns 25 points to the No. 1 team in its final rankings every season. Teams that are serving an NCAA probation, however, are not included in the Coaches Poll rankings and as a result receive no points for that season. This affected each of the top three teams in the Coaches Poll All-Time rankings.

In 1973, Barry Switzer’s first season as the OU head coach, Oklahoma went 10-0-1 and finished No. 2 in the final Coaches Poll rankings, despite serving the first of a two-year NCAA probation. The very next season, the Sooners were a perfect 11-0 and were crowned the AP national champions. Because that was the first season the Coaches Poll stopped ranking teams on probation, however, the Coaches Poll did not recognize the Sooners and they were not included in the top-25 that season.

Ohio State faced a similar fate in the 2012 season, as did Alabama in 1995 and 2002.

Oklahoma was not ranked among the top 25 teams in either national poll in the first four seasons the Big 12 was in operation (1996-99), but the Sooners have been ranked in the final Coaches Poll Top 25 in 20 of the 22 seasons since then in both the Coaches and AP polls.