Members of the Michigan State football team present the Paul Bunyan trophy to Spartan fans on Oct. 17, 2015, after the game against Michigan at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor. The Spartans defeated the Wolverines, 27-23.
The Associated Press released its first Top 100 list of the best college football programs of all time Tuesday afternoon, and MSU football can count itself amongst the top 25 checking in at No. 19.
AP used a three category formula and points system based on AP poll appearances (one point), AP No. 1 rankings (one point) and championships awarded by AP voters (10 points) to decipher the all-time best teams.
According to AP, MSU racked up 443 points in its calculations appearing in 375 AP poll appearances (34 percent of all the AP polls) since 1948 and has held the number one ranking 29 times.
The Spartans have only captured one AP championship (1952), though the school itself claims six national titles (1951, 1952, 1955, 1957, 1965, 1966).
The AP all-time list also provided the top 25 teams on its list a best and worst decade of rankings. MSU’s best decade came during the high flying 1960s when it popped up on 74.14 percent of AP polls during the era. On the flip-side the 1980s saw the Spartans garner a spot in only 16.15 percent of AP polls.
MSU is one of seven current Big Ten schools to reach the top 25 alongside Ohio State (No.1), Nebraska (No. 6), Michigan (No. 7), Penn State (No. 12), Wisconsin (No. 24) and Iowa (No. 25).
AP’s weekly Top 25 poll has been one way of determining college football’s national champion since 1936 and its weekly polls are widely considered the determining ranking for each team.
Based majorly on the opinions of voting members, the AP poll has been a driver of controversy over the years in determining the national champion, in a long era where there was no singular game that pitted the nation's two best teams against each other.
The invention of the Bowl Championship Series, or BCS, threw the notion of a poll being the singular determining factor for a champion, out the window in 1998 and substituted the poll with a national championship game between the nation’s two best teams.
The BCS compiled polls and used computers to materialize who the two best teams were at the end of each season. Marred with controversy itself, the BCS was thrown out in favor of a four-team playoff system in 2014, more formally known as the College Football Playoff.
MSU reached the College Football Playoff this past season losing to Alabama, 38-0.
The Spartans kick-off the 2016 season on Sept. 2 at home against Furman at 7 p.m.
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