8/18/2026

This is a topic I believe to be extremely important in today’s college football world and I briefly touched on it in last week’s article. Preseason rankings are great in theory, when the season ends in January there is not a ton to cover for the coming months. You get the Way Too Early Rankings, transfer portal/recruiting rankings, spring camp etc, but it starts to get pretty barren. By July people are getting pretty restless, so when the first coaches poll comes out, and all these preseason ranking magazines come out, we flock to them. We form our own judgments on these teams and start to debate who should be placed where, who is better than who, and who is overrated/underrated etc. 

Now there is nothing wrong at all about being opinionated about specific teams. For example I think Louisville will be fantastic this year and make the ACC championship, and I think Michigan will be much better than people realize. So I would place both in the top 25 teams in the country right now. For arguments sake, let’s say Louisville gets beat by 30 by Ole Miss, and Michigan loses week 2 to Oklahoma by 40. What would be wrong is if I still kept both in my Top 25 rankings. The only reason I would be keeping them in my Top 25 is because I am holding onto my preseason rankings and expectations. I have tied my own pride to being right about them and because of that I refuse to drop them. This is the line where preseason rankings become dangerous. My rankings then become more based on expectations and pride more than they are results. The AP Top 25 is supposed to be a cumulative ranking of teams based on their body of work aka their resume thus far. In the preseason, you have to go off of expectations, perceived strength of schedule, and talent rosters as there hasn’t been any games yet so that is totally okay. Josh Pate said it best, “one quarter of the first game tells you more about a team than any preview magazine will.” My entire point here is to have fun with the preseason rankings, but do not tie yourself to them. Once games start to be played, be flexible because it is a slippery slope ranking off pride and potential and not resumes. Where we see many of these crimes against rankings I just mentioned are via the AP Poll which is the most popular and widely used college football rankings put out. 

If you do not know what the AP Poll is, it is a cumulative ranking from 62 individual sportswriters and broadcasters across the country chosen by the Associated Press. They submit their ballots and rankings and those are averaged to bring us the Top 25. Let’s look at arguably the biggest case of AP Voter malpractice I have ever seen. Last year unranked USF beat #16 Florida 18-16 in Week 3 which was a big upset. After that week concluded, USF jumped up to #18 in the country, and Florida lost their ranking. Haley Williams, a reporter who covers USC for the Orange County Register had Florida (who lost) move up 2 spots to #16 in her ballot, and USF was still unranked. When this came out it was almost unbelievable and felt like a prank, I do not need to explain how insane this is. What is even worse is she responded to the backlash saying “I don’t want to go too much into my process or logic…It’s really fun but it doesn’t probably matter in the end.” After she said this many people called for her to lose her AP ballot vote, including myself. If you are not going to watch the games, or take a ranking that determines perception on the team seriously, you should under no circumstances have a vote. Big 10 Analyst Jake Butt had an amazing quote on this, he said “It absolutely, 100%, without a doubt matters. There’s no thinking otherwise. It matters. Rankings shape perspective, perspective/ perception shapes narrative, narrative absolutely matters in a subjective, committee pick based system. Indefensible to say it doesn’t matter in the end.”

The college football playoff teams are chosen by a group of individuals, not by a computer ranking or an algorithm. These are humans picking these teams, same as the AP Poll. Yes, the CFP committee is supposed to rank their own criteria and own system, but take a guess at what the biggest influence to determine the initial order of those playoff rankings are? If you guessed the AP Poll, you would be correct. So if a voter thinks his or her rankings do not matter in the end, their vote to the AP Poll should be revoked immediately. There are some other radical voters out there who have their own outlandish systems, but oftentimes with those you will notice those rankings are at least consistent and uniform, you do not have ranked teams who lost to an unranked team move up in your rankings the week they lost. 

We also see overcorrection or undercorrection in many cases with some voters. This is a case where a team with expectations to win or lose will go up or down an egregious amount of spots. This also leads to a lot of public backlash. The best case of this was the final CFB ranking last year when Miami jumped Notre Dame for the final spot. Now this was from the CFB Playoff Committee, but heavily influenced by AP Poll. Quick summary (my mom will likely read this so I need to put this in here so she understands), Miami beat Notre Dame early in the season last year, and Miami then had some losses, which led to them going down in the rankings, but then back up. Notre Dame kept winning so they were slowly climbing the rankings all season. When the CFB rankings came out, ND was ahead of Miami, and eventually they were #12 and #13 going into the final ranking where we were to find out who was really in and who was out. Neither team played that final week so the expectation was Notre Dame was to be in, but the committee last minute moved Miami up one spot. This created outrage for Notre Dame fans, and caused celebration for Miami fans. My whole point here is that if the committee had Miami ranked above Notre Dame as soon as they were next to each other in the rankings, as they should have, there would not have been nearly as much outrage. This specific case is something that could be discussed in its own article, but all of that back and forth happened last season. The point here being is that voters will make adjustments off of how they think they will perform in future games, not how they have performed in games already played, as many thought Notre Dame was a better team than Miami at the end of the season, even though the two teams already played. 

I wanted to write this article prior to the season starting so you all could understand why it is important to not hold onto expectations too tight once the games start to be played if your team who you thought would do well start losing, and to pay attention to where the voters rank teams. Do not be that person that continues to rank teams off what you think or thought their potential is. Unless they are your favorite team which be as delusional as you want. 

Lastly, if you want to see the poll rankings broken down by voter and team, https://collegepolltracker.com/football/grid is the best website to do so. Here is the preseason rankings they put out Monday.