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Toronto Star
4 days ago
- Sport
- Toronto Star
From Red Grange to Travis Hunter, the AP All-America team has been the ‘gold standard' for a century
For 100 years, The Associated Press has honored the best of the best in college football with its annual All-America team. Nearly 2,000 men — from Red Grange to Travis Hunter — have earned the distinction of AP All-American in a tradition that rivals the longest in the history of the game.
Washington Post
4 days ago
- Sport
- Washington Post
From Red Grange to Travis Hunter, the AP All-America team has been the 'gold standard' for a century
For 100 years, The Associated Press has honored the best of the best in college football with its annual All-America team. Nearly 2,000 men — from Red Grange to Travis Hunter — have earned the distinction of AP All-American in a tradition that rivals the longest in the history of the game.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
From Red Grange to Travis Hunter, the AP All-America team has been the 'gold standard' for a century
For 100 years, The Associated Press has honored the best of the best in college football with its annual All-America team. Nearly 2,000 men — from Red Grange to Travis Hunter — have earned the distinction of AP All-American in a tradition that rivals the longest in the history of the game. 'For anyone named an AP All-America, the honor has immediate cachet,' said John Heisler, who worked in media relations at Notre Dame for 41 years and is the author of 11 books on the Irish's football history. 'If anyone received multiple All-America honors, it always seemed like the AP recognition would be at the top of the list.' Notre Dame leads all schools with 85 AP first-team picks since the news organization's All-America honors debuted in 1925. The Irish are followed by Alabama (83), Ohio State (79), Southern California (77) and Oklahoma (75). The Southeastern Conference has had the most first-team picks with 340. The Big Ten has had 331. Independents, which anchored the sport's power structure into the 1950s, have had 309. There have been 204 players twice named first-team All-American, including 12 three-time picks. Malcolm Moran, who covered college football for four decades at The New York Times and other major newspapers, said the AP All-America team drove growth of the sport because it introduced football stars to pockets of the country where exposure to the game was limited to newsreels. 'The thing that connected 3,000 miles of players," said Moran, now director of the Sports Capital Journalism Program at IU Indianapolis, 'was the AP All-America team.' It still does. 'The AP All-America teams are probably the most consistent throughout the last 100 years and have been considered the measure most often used when chronicling the history of college football's greatest players,' said Claude Felton, who retired as senior associate athletic director at Georgia last year after overseeing the Bulldogs' sports communications for 45 years. How it began Walter Camp, regarded as the 'Father of Football,' is credited with being the first to honor the top players across the college game. Camp starred as a player at Yale and later was its coach, and he was the sport's chief rules maker and ambassador in the early days. He saw football as a means to develop manly traits necessary for success in the male-dominated corporate and industrial worlds at the turn of the 20th century, Camp biographer Julie Des Jardins said. Camp named 11 players to his first All-America team, in 1889, and their names appeared in This Week's Sport, a publication owned by Camp associate Caspar Whitney. Camp selected All-America teams every year until his death, in 1925. Famed sports writer Grantland Rice selected the Walter Camp teams into the 1950s, and coaches and college sports information directors have picked the teams for the Walter Camp Football Foundation since the 1960s. What constitutes an All-American has evolved since the days of Camp, who didn't necessarily look at the All-Americans as individual standouts. To Camp, it was more about team. 'He almost looked at them as the ones who were doing all the work under the hood,' Des Jardins said. 'He really glorified the center because you could barely see what he was doing. But the center was essential. And he also was part of the machine that made the machine work better than the sum of its parts.' By the 1920s, when a multitude of media outlets were naming All-America teams, individual performance was the main criteria. Grange, Bronko Nagurski, Davey O'Brien, Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard became synonymous with gridiron greatness in an era when sports fans relied on the nation's sports pages and magazines to be arbiters of who was best. The NCAA football record book lists 22 organizations that have named All-America teams, and there have been dozens of others. Most have come and gone. The AP team Like Camp, Alan J. Gould, the AP sports editor in the 1920s and '30s, saw All-America teams as a way to promote the sport and create a national conversation. He unveiled the inaugural All-America team the first week of December in 1925. Those early teams were selected by consensus of 'prominent eastern coaches,' according to dispatches at the time. As it was then and remains today, the picks can be fodder for debate, the conversation around game days and postseason hopes. In a write-up about that inaugural team, it was noted that Dartmouth coach Jess Hawley chose three of his own players — not surprising given the undefeated team's dominance that year — but one of his omissions prompted second guessing. 'Hawley honors three of his own stars, Parker, Diehl and Oberlander with places on the team but does not pick his brilliant end, Tully, who has been placed on nearly every all-star team named so far," the AP story said. No worries. George Tully got enough votes from other coaches to make the AP All-America team anyway. The methods for selecting the AP All-America teams have varied over the years. Coaches' picks gave way to a media panel headed by the AP sports editor and made up of sports writers from the AP and newspapers across the nation. Later, the teams were picked by a small group of AP sports writers. For the past two decades, the teams have been selected by some five dozen media members who vote in the weekly AP Top 25 football poll. 'The AP was the one I that cared about -- the writers telling me that I was the player that deserved to be All-American,' 2004 All-America receiver Braylon Edwards of Michigan said. "That was the one that I was waiting for.' Exposure for the AP All-America team was elevated when selected players were featured during a segment of entertainer Bob Hope's Christmas television special. Each player, including the likes of Earl Campbell, Billy Sims and Marcus Allen, would jog on stage. Hope would make a funny remark and then the next player would come out. The tradition lasted 24 years, until 1994. 'That's the first thing I thought of when I saw 'AP All-American.' I thought of Bob Hope," Moran said. Where the AP once was the chief purveyor of national college football news, there are now myriad outlets where fans can get their fix. But through all the changes in the media landscape, the AP All-America team has endured and continues to have the most gravitas. 'This," Moran said, 'has been the gold standard.' ___ AP Sports Writer Larry Lage in Ann Arbor, Michigan, contributed. ___ Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here. AP college football: and
Associated Press
4 days ago
- Sport
- Associated Press
From Red Grange to Travis Hunter, the AP All-America team has been the 'gold standard' for a century
For 100 years, The Associated Press has honored the best of the best in college football with its annual All-America team. Nearly 2,000 men — from Red Grange to Travis Hunter — have earned the distinction of AP All-American in a tradition that rivals the longest in the history of the game. 'For anyone named an AP All-America, the honor has immediate cachet,' said John Heisler, who worked in media relations at Notre Dame for 41 years and is the author of 11 books on the Irish's football history. 'If anyone received multiple All-America honors, it always seemed like the AP recognition would be at the top of the list.' Notre Dame leads all schools with 85 AP first-team picks since the news organization's All-America honors debuted in 1925. The Irish are followed by Alabama (83), Ohio State (79), Southern California (77) and Oklahoma (75). The Southeastern Conference has had the most first-team picks with 340. The Big Ten has had 331. Independents, which anchored the sport's power structure into the 1950s, have had 309. There have been 204 players twice named first-team All-American, including 12 three-time picks. Malcolm Moran, who covered college football for four decades at The New York Times and other major newspapers, said the AP All-America team drove growth of the sport because it introduced football stars to pockets of the country where exposure to the game was limited to newsreels. 'The thing that connected 3,000 miles of players,' said Moran, now director of the Sports Capital Journalism Program at IU Indianapolis, 'was the AP All-America team.' It still does. 'The AP All-America teams are probably the most consistent throughout the last 100 years and have been considered the measure most often used when chronicling the history of college football's greatest players,' said Claude Felton, who retired as senior associate athletic director at Georgia last year after overseeing the Bulldogs' sports communications for 45 years. How it began Walter Camp, regarded as the 'Father of Football,' is credited with being the first to honor the top players across the college game. Camp starred as a player at Yale and later was its coach, and he was the sport's chief rules maker and ambassador in the early days. He saw football as a means to develop manly traits necessary for success in the male-dominated corporate and industrial worlds at the turn of the 20th century, Camp biographer Julie Des Jardins said. Camp named 11 players to his first All-America team, in 1889, and their names appeared in This Week's Sport, a publication owned by Camp associate Caspar Whitney. Camp selected All-America teams every year until his death, in 1925. Famed sports writer Grantland Rice selected the Walter Camp teams into the 1950s, and coaches and college sports information directors have picked the teams for the Walter Camp Football Foundation since the 1960s. What constitutes an All-American has evolved since the days of Camp, who didn't necessarily look at the All-Americans as individual standouts. To Camp, it was more about team. 'He almost looked at them as the ones who were doing all the work under the hood,' Des Jardins said. 'He really glorified the center because you could barely see what he was doing. But the center was essential. And he also was part of the machine that made the machine work better than the sum of its parts.' By the 1920s, when a multitude of media outlets were naming All-America teams, individual performance was the main criteria. Grange, Bronko Nagurski, Davey O'Brien, Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard became synonymous with gridiron greatness in an era when sports fans relied on the nation's sports pages and magazines to be arbiters of who was best. The NCAA football record book lists 22 organizations that have named All-America teams, and there have been dozens of others. Most have come and gone. The AP team Like Camp, Alan J. Gould, the AP sports editor in the 1920s and '30s, saw All-America teams as a way to promote the sport and create a national conversation. He unveiled the inaugural All-America team the first week of December in 1925. Those early teams were selected by consensus of 'prominent eastern coaches,' according to dispatches at the time. As it was then and remains today, the picks can be fodder for debate, the conversation around game days and postseason hopes. In a write-up about that inaugural team, it was noted that Dartmouth coach Jess Hawley chose three of his own players — not surprising given the undefeated team's dominance that year — but one of his omissions prompted second guessing. 'Hawley honors three of his own stars, Parker, Diehl and Oberlander with places on the team but does not pick his brilliant end, Tully, who has been placed on nearly every all-star team named so far,' the AP story said. No worries. George Tully got enough votes from other coaches to make the AP All-America team anyway. The methods for selecting the AP All-America teams have varied over the years. Coaches' picks gave way to a media panel headed by the AP sports editor and made up of sports writers from the AP and newspapers across the nation. Later, the teams were picked by a small group of AP sports writers. For the past two decades, the teams have been selected by some five dozen media members who vote in the weekly AP Top 25 football poll. 'The AP was the one I that cared about -- the writers telling me that I was the player that deserved to be All-American,' 2004 All-America receiver Braylon Edwards of Michigan said. 'That was the one that I was waiting for.' Exposure for the AP All-America team was elevated when selected players were featured during a segment of entertainer Bob Hope's Christmas television special. Each player, including the likes of Earl Campbell, Billy Sims and Marcus Allen, would jog on stage. Hope would make a funny remark and then the next player would come out. The tradition lasted 24 years, until 1994. 'That's the first thing I thought of when I saw 'AP All-American.' I thought of Bob Hope,' Moran said. Where the AP once was the chief purveyor of national college football news, there are now myriad outlets where fans can get their fix. But through all the changes in the media landscape, the AP All-America team has endured and continues to have the most gravitas. 'This,' Moran said, 'has been the gold standard.' ___ AP Sports Writer Larry Lage in Ann Arbor, Michigan, contributed. ___ Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here. AP college football: and
Japan Times
16-04-2025
- Sport
- Japan Times
Sumo's throwback regional tours offer glimpse into sport's heart and history
The Grand Sumo Spring Regional Tour, which wound its way through the Kansai and Chubu regions over the past few weeks, has entered its final leg in Tokyo and the prefectures surrounding the capital. With tickets for many of the stops along the way still having been available up to one or two days beforehand, jungyō (regional tours) remain perhaps the most accessible pro sumo events in 2025. That's particularly true for foreign visitors to Japan, as ticket prices for the regional tour are anywhere from 10 to 20 times cheaper than those for similar seats at the upcoming events in London and Paris. In many ways, jungyō are a throwback to an earlier era in the history of Japan's national sport and, while the bouts may not carry the importance of those that take place during official tournaments, they are something that all fans should try to experience at least once. With regional promotional jaunts being a formative, but long abandoned, feature of many sports — think the Chicago Bears legendary 1925-26 barnstorming tour with Red Grange, which popularized professional football in the United States — the fact that you can still experience something similar in the 21st century is one of the points that makes sumo utterly unique. Emperor's Cup races in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuoka may get the headlines and prime-time coverage, but in out-of-the-way small towns across the nation, a more immediate and accessible sumo still exists. Of course the grueling nature of jungyō — particularly those that take place during the scorching summer months — is well known and often a point of contention among wrestlers and commentators alike, but they are also an opportunity for lesser-known rikishi to have their moment in the spotlight. 'The local sandanme over the Edo ozeki' is a traditional sumo saying that describes how fans tend to have greater interest in lower ranked wrestlers who hail from their region compared with superstars of the sport from elsewhere. It's a psychological trait that jungyō utilize to full effect, with men hailing from stops along the route often being featured in various activities or doing better than would normally be expected when in or near their hometown. Shorn of the intense pressure of needing to win to ensure favorable rankings positions (and the often dramatic changes that come with them), jungyō are far more relaxed and open. Plus, given that outreach and, to a lesser extent, recruitment are intrinsic elements of the regional tours, opportunities to interact with rikishi are not only more common, but far more likely to be met with a welcome response. Asking for photographs or autographs at grand tournaments can be hit or miss, with the stresses and strains of competition causing many wrestlers, even when they do acquiesce, to act in a withdrawn or distracted manner. On jungyō, however, it's not only possible to have long chats with many of the sport's biggest names, but the 'boys on tour' nature of the event often leads to them joking and playing around with fans — hamming it up for photos and displaying an unfiltered side of their personalities that isn't normally seen. Many elements of jungyō serve to remind fans of the human side of a sport whose inner workings still remain a mystery to the general public. Because of social media restrictions, and the 24/7 nature of sumo life — with no separation between work and private time in regards to how much control the governing body has — wrestlers, while well known, don't get the kind of individually focused exposure common to superstars in baseball or soccer. On jungyō, however, there is a whole host of activities that break down those barriers and allow the true personalities of the wrestlers to shine through. And even in a time when virtually unlimited access to information is available, and the ability to contact stables open to all, the importance of a physical presence in a location when it comes to recruiting cannot be overstated. Seeing yokozuna Hoshoryu and ozeki Onosato battling it out on a ring in the same municipal arena or high school basketball gym that you practice in every weekend can have a huge impression on young athletes. Speak to top rugby, football or soccer players and they'll often say that their choice of college or professional team was influenced by an interaction that happened when they were a child. Whether a coaching clinic or a school visit by a star athlete, the impacts of in-person connections are long-lasting. The impact isn't all a one-way street, either. For lower ranked rikishi – particularly those from stables without top stars – jungyō offer an extended opportunity to see how the elite wrestlers train and prepare. Being able to receive advice from and practice with a higher level of opponent can provide the impetus for a rise up the rankings. The extended schedules of jungyō in recent years have sometimes led to concerns over exhaustion for rikishi, meaning the positive sides of a traditional practice often get overlooked. Attend a regional tour event, however, and see and feel the positivity and enthusiasm of fans who only get to see one day of live sumo a year – if that – and you'll understand that jungyō have a value that goes beyond simply nostalgia or outreach. It's in the remote towns up mountains and down winding narrow roads that the traditional spirit of sumo can most easily be accessed.
