Everyone knows that late August feeling. You’re staring at your phone, scrolling through the fresh AP preseason college football rankings, and your first instinct is to get angry. Maybe your team is buried at 19 when they clearly belong in the top 10. Or perhaps some "blue blood" is sitting at No. 3 purely because of the logo on their helmet, despite losing half their starters to the NFL.
Rankings are weird. They’re essentially a collective guess by 60-plus sportswriters, yet they hold this massive, invisible power over how we view the entire season. By the time October rolls around, half of these rankings will look like a total joke. But for now? They’re the law of the land.
The 2025 AP Preseason Reality Check
Let's talk about what actually happened when the 2025 poll dropped. It wasn't exactly a shock to see the Texas Longhorns take the top spot. With Arch Manning finally taking the reins and Steve Sarkisian building a roster that looks more like an NFL farm team, the hype was unavoidable. They pulled in 25 first-place votes, narrowly beating out Penn State, who actually got 23 first-place votes of their own.
It’s the first time in history Texas started at No. 1. Think about that for a second. Even in the Vince Young or Colt McCoy eras, they never got this specific preseason nod.
Here is how the top of that 2025 AP preseason college football rankings list shook out:
- Texas (1,552 points)
- Penn State (Coming off a massive 2024 surge)
- Ohio State (The defending champs always get the benefit of the doubt)
- Clemson (Cade Klubnik finally started looking like the five-star he was supposed to be)
- Georgia (Kirby Smart's "underdog" narrative is getting harder to sell at No. 5)
The SEC absolutely bullied the list, grabbing 10 of the top 25 spots. The Big Ten followed with five. If you’re a fan of a team in the Big 12 or ACC, you’re probably used to this "Power Two" bias by now. It’s annoying, sure, but the voters follow the talent, and right now, the talent is concentrated in two massive super-conferences.
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Why We Should Stop Trusting Preseason Polls
Honestly, the "No. 1" tag is kinda a curse. Since the turn of the century, only two teams—USC in 2004 and Alabama in 2017—started the season at the top of the AP preseason college football rankings and actually finished there. Everyone else? They crumbled under the weight of expectations or just weren't as good as the writers thought.
Remember Florida State in 2024? They were a top-10 preseason darling and ended up losing to Georgia Tech in Ireland before their fans even finished their first Guinness.
Voters love a good story. They love a returning quarterback. They love a coach with a ring. But they’re terrible at predicting chemistry. You can’t account for a locker room rift or a star linebacker tearing an ACL in Week 2 through a ballot cast in mid-August.
The Most Overrated and Underrated Programs
If you look at the data over the last few decades, some teams consistently get "the benefit of the doubt" while others are perpetually disrespected.
USC is the king of being overrated. They’ve finished unranked three times in the last five years despite starting with a number next to their name. On the flip side, BYU and Northwestern are the teams that voters hate to love. They rarely start in the Top 25, yet they have a weird habit of finishing there.
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The 12-Team Playoff Changed Everything
We used to say these rankings didn't matter because "it all settles on the field." That was a lie. In the old four-team system, starting at No. 20 meant you had to be basically perfect to even sniff a semifinal. You needed chaos above you.
Now, with 12 teams, the AP preseason college football rankings act like a springboard. If you start high, you can afford a "quality loss" in September and stay in the hunt. If you start unranked, you’re climbing a mountain with greased shoes.
Poll inertia is a very real thing. Writers hate to admit they were wrong. If they rank a team No. 6, they’ll keep them in the top 15 even after a bad loss, just to justify their original vote. It’s human nature. It’s also why teams like Notre Dame always seem to linger in the rankings longer than their resume suggests they should.
How the 2026 Season is Already Shaping Up
As we sit here in early 2026, looking back at how the 2025 season unfolded (with Indiana being the shock of the century), the cycle is starting all over again. The next batch of preseason rankings will likely over-correct for last year's mistakes.
We’re going to see:
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- The "Indiana Effect": Voters will be terrified to leave out the next "Cinderella" and might over-rank a mid-tier Big Ten team like Illinois or Iowa.
- The Quarterback Carousel: With the transfer portal, teams can change overnight. Dante Moore's return to Oregon for the 2026 season is already making the Ducks a projected top-3 lock.
- SEC Fatigue: There's a growing sentiment that ranking 10 SEC teams is overkill, but until the Big 12 proves they can produce a consistent national title contender, the bias will remain.
Don't Let the Numbers Fool You
The most important thing to remember about the AP preseason college football rankings is that they are a marketing tool as much as a competitive one. They build hype for "Top 25 matchups" in Week 1. They give ESPN and FOX something to put in the "ticker" at the bottom of the screen.
If your team is ranked No. 24, don't celebrate yet. If they're unranked, don't throw your remote. History shows that about 50% of the teams on that August list won't be there in December.
Actionable Takeaways for the College Football Fan
Instead of just getting mad at the writers, use the rankings to your advantage as a viewer:
- Watch the "Others Receiving Votes" list. That’s where the real value is. Teams like Boise State or SMU often lurk just outside the Top 25 and end up being the most profitable teams to follow.
- Track the "Drop-Off" point. Look at the gap in points between No. 10 and No. 11. Usually, there’s a massive cliff where voters stop being sure and start guessing. That’s where the upsets happen.
- Ignore the "No. 1" hype. Unless it’s a generational Alabama or Georgia squad, the top-ranked team is almost always a victim of their own schedule.
- Look at the Trenches. Preseason polls are obsessed with quarterbacks and wide receivers. If you want to know who will actually stay ranked, look at who returns four out of five offensive linemen.
The rankings are a fun tradition, a way to signal that summer is over and Saturdays actually mean something again. Just don't bet your mortgage on them. They’re a snapshot of a moment that hasn’t happened yet, written by people who are just as excited—and just as prone to being wrong—as you are.
Keep an eye on the injury reports and the strength of schedule. A team ranked 15th with a brutal November might be a worse "bet" than an unranked team with a cakewalk path to their conference title game. In the 12-team playoff era, the only ranking that truly matters is the one released in December, but the preseason poll is the map we use to get there.