Mike Persinger can always claim he helped change college football history.
But that wasn’t necessarily the intention of a column he penned on Dec. 10, 2004, during which he announced, because of ethical complications with the Bowl Championship Series, that his newspaper, the Charlotte Observer, was ceding its vote in the Associated Press college football poll. Persinger was mildly surprised when that column sparked the AP to do something that, at the time, shook the sport: demand for the BCS to no longer use its poll as a part of its formula.
“The kicker on what I wrote to begin with was there should be a playoff,” says Persinger, still the sports editor in Charlotte, “and the fact that there is, that’s satisfying to me.