Is the Baton Rouge Advocate’s Koki Riley the worst AP Poll voter or the best?

This originally appeared in Wednesday’s edition of  The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter with the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis. Sign up here and be the first to know everything you need to know about the sports media world.

As there often is, there has been much Sturm und Drang about the AP Poll this college football season. The complaints have perhaps been a bit louder this year due to the flux that so many programs have found themselves in. Early-season top-ten picks like Notre Dame, Penn State, and Texas have tumbled while the pollsters clearly didn’t see Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt, or Indiana coming.

Even when the overall poll itself is aligned with expectations, there are always some outliers. A pollster gives their local team a little too much shine. Another severely handicapped a team that everyone else thinks should be No. 1. It often makes for fun but harmless fodder.

And then there’s Koki Riley of the Baton Rouge Advocate, who has been accused of being the worst AP Poll voter “in the history of the sport.”

So said Barstool Tate earlier this week after the most recent poll was released.

“This week, we got to give it up to, hands down, the worst AP voter, not just now, not just in the last few years, but in the history of the sport,” said Tate in a video released Monday. “He truly is the absolute best at being the absolute worst. You all know who I’m talking about. He looks like he’s 14, votes like he’s throwing darts at a whiteboard. And honestly, I think his biggest problem is that he doesn’t understand the point of the poll.”

Compared to the aggregate, Riley had undefeated Ohio State low at No. 3, undefeated Georgia Tech underranked by nine spots, undefeated BYU underranked by four spots, did not rank Virginia (No. 15 overall), and was the only voter to rank Illinois. College Poll Tracker rated nine of his 25 selections as an “extreme pick.”

To his credit, Riley responded, explaining his thinking on each of those controversial picks, starting with having OSU below both Indiana and Texas A&M.

“To be honest, I think Ohio State, Texas, A&M, Indiana are clearly in their own little tier at the moment,” said Riley. “I think all those teams are pretty close, especially after what A&M did tell us this past weekend, especially given how good Indiana has been this entire season. I think you make a strong argument for any of those two teams to be one, two, or three.

“But for me, Ohio State is number three because they have a weaker resume so far this season in terms of who they’ve beaten and how they’ve beaten them than Indiana, especially given the fact that both these teams have played Illinois and Indiana beat them by a lot more, honestly. Ohio State beat them pretty easily, but it wasn’t quite as dominant. Indiana also has the better win in beating Oregon.

“Between Texas A&M and Ohio State, it’s super duper close. I lean towards Texas A&M because I like their offense a little bit more, but I think the resumes are pretty even.”

Riley doesn’t come across as a voter who doesn’t watch the games or is biased; he offers clear reasoning for each selection and says he will continue to rank teams accordingly.

“I have a reason for everything,” he said. “I watch the games. I look at the resumes very, very closely. I consider not just who you beat, but how you beat them, where you beat them, who you lost to, how’d you lose to them, where you lost to them. There’s a lot of different factors that go into this thing.”

Ultimately, yes, some of Riley’s rankings are unconventional and are outliers, but we’re gonna side with him on this one. Isn’t this what you want from an AP voter? An independent thought process that takes into account the minutiae of gameplay, outcomes, and strength of schedule?

You might disagree with his ranking, but we’ll gladly take someone willing to step out on a ledge and defend themselves over a voter who ranks teams in lockstep with everyone else or bases their rankings solely on the names on the front of the jerseys. The latter is usually why we end up with bad preseason polls in the first place.