Indiana football ends longest Power Five AP Poll drought; who’s next?

Indiana football is now No. 24, its first AP appearance since 1994 (the longest streak of a Power Five team). Who will be next to end an AP poll drought?

Indiana’s rise to the No. 24 ranking in the AP poll for Week 12 ended the Power 5’s longest drought remaining as an unranked team. The Hoosiers, now 7-2, are fresh off a bye week in which several other ranked teams lost (namely No. 16 Kansas State and No. 19 Wake Forest) and tumbled out of the rankings.

Indiana defeated Northwestern in Week 10, 34-3, which guaranteed the program’s second winning season since 1994 (a 7-6 finish in 2007). If the Hoosiers win one of their next three games against Penn State, Michigan or Purdue, it will be the school’s highest win total since 1993.

It’s a remarkable achievement for third-year coach Tom Allen, who led the Hoosiers to 5-7 finishes in each of his first two seasons with the program.

Now that Indiana has ended its unranked stretch of 25 years, in-state conference rival Purdue becomes the Power 5 team with the longest unranked streak. The Boilermakers last appeared in the AP Top 25 in 2007.

To raise another important question, though, which football programs currently have the longest droughts of appearances in the AP poll? And which one of these programs is most likely to end that drought?

Of course, there are new schools (to FBS competition or in existence) that have never been ranked in the AP Top 25, such as UTSA, Appalachian State, Old Dominion, Texas State, South Alabama, UMass, Georgia State, Charlotte and Georgia Southern. This list does not include them, because it contains schools that have once been ranked in the AP Top 25, but have not received enough votes for a ranking for a considerable amount of time.

Read on to see the list of teams with the longest AP ranking droughts.