Preseason college football rankings are great for engagement, great for discussion and great for creating narratives about the season ahead. They are not always great for identifying the best football teams in the country, and the Week 1 schedule helped illustrate that point once again.
While a lot of ranked teams around the country did win, and win big, a lot of them were in games with obvious mismatches pitting two teams against one another that shouldn’t ever be on the same field together.
The tune-up games.
The “We’re going to pay you a lot of money to come to our school and let us put 45 points on you” games.
But in the more evenly matched games, the preseason rankings ended up looking mostly meaningless.
Among the most egregious examples of preseason rankings looking bad were No. 25 Boise State getting absolutely dominated by an unranked South Florida team, and No. 8 Alabama losing by two touchdowns — and getting pushed around in the process — to a Florida State program that won only two games a year ago.
In Alabama’s case, the Crimson Tide are now 5-5 in their past 10 games going back to the 2024 season. There is nothing about their current resume that suggests they should have been in the top 10, and their Week 1 performance should only knock them down further.
It wasn’t just those two examples, either.
So far this season, we have already seen four games between teams that were ranked in the preseason AP poll.
In every single one of those games, the lower-ranked team won.
No. 22 Iowa State beat No. 17 Kansas State in Dublin back on Aug. 23, No. 3 Ohio State beat No. 1 Texas, No. 9 LSU knocked off No. 4 Clemson and No. 10 Miami defeated No. 6 Notre Dame.
Not only did Kansas State lose to a lower-ranked team in Dublin, it came back a week later and barely hung on to beat an FCS team (North Dakota) at home. That’s a team that was clearly over-ranked to start the season.
Overall, four of the top eight teams in the country in the preseason poll have already lost games. It’s not a great look for the voters to do in identifying the best teams.
And to be fair, that’s understandable.
We still do not know anything about these teams or how they will look on the field. In any season, it has always been difficult to know that before any games are played, but it is even tougher in the modern college football landscape when rosters change so much from year to year, given the transfer portal. Rosters are not developed and set over multiple seasons. Players are always coming and going, and it takes time for them to come together with their new teams and see how it all works.
Sometimes it does work. Sometimes it does not. We just never know how it is going to go when we have not seen them play together. It really complicates things when those preseason rankings create an expectation or narrative for a team that maybe did not deserve it.
Polls and rankings are great. We should just start waiting at least a week or two — or at least until we see them play a game — before we start taking them seriously.
