Last week began with several breaking news alerts regarding the first AP college football poll of the 2025 season. The Texas Longhorns will start as the consensus number one. The very same Texas Longhorns who are currently a 3 1/2 point underdog to the homestanding Ohio State Buckeyes in their August 30 lidlifter. And the very same Buckeyes who defeated them earlier in 2025–the first day of the year, to be precise–in the College Football Playoff semi-final (a.k.a. Cotton Bowl) and also won the last game of the year played to date and enter as the defending national champions.
So what does qualify Texas to be ranked as America’s top team entering this game? Well, as the ASSOCIATED PRESS itself spun it on Monday, trend lines and hype:
“Arch Mania” is at a fever pitch in Texas with Arch Manning now the undisputed starting quarterback.
The Longhorns have been on an upward trajectory since they were 5-7 in 2021, Steve Sarkisian’s first season. They have won 25 of their last 30 games and reached two straight CFP semifinals. Last year, they were ranked No. 1 four of five weeks from mid-September to mid-October, and they reached the SEC championship game in their first season in the conference.
“But this is a new year, new faces, new team, and obviously expectations are high for our program,” Sarkisian said at SEC media days. “I’m not naive to that. I don’t put my head in the sand, and expectations are very high. But I also say we’re the University of Texas, and the standard is the standard here, and that’s competing for championships year in and year out.”
Yet in the same breath the service is putting out even more qualifiers than a certain obese fascist attempted to do en route to Alaska last week:
The Longhorns hardly have a mandate in the poll: They edged out Penn State by just five points in the closest preseason vote since 1998.
Texas received 25 first-place votes and 1,552 points to give the Southeastern Conference the preseason No. 1 team for a record fifth straight year. The Nittany Lions got 23 first-place votes and 1,547 points for their highest preseason ranking since they were No. 1 to open the 1997 season. Still, Texas received just 38.5% of the first-place votes (25 of 65), the smallest share for a No. 1 team in the preseason poll since Georgia got 33.9% (22 of 65) in 2008.
Which, one could suppose, makes the Nittany Lions’ season opener at Happy Valley against Nevada the second most significant matchup, and it just so happens to be CBS’ first Big Ten game and is scheduled to kick off minutes after Texas and Penn State wrap up.
And a week before all of this, in the infamous Week 0, we actually get a crucial Top 25 showdown between Big XII rivals Kansas State and Iowa State as ESPN’s first game of the year, to be played at a venue nearly equidistant from each other–in Dublin, Ireland. But yep, ESPN’s promoting it as a battle between two ranked teams.
And that’s similar to what other networks and platforms large and small are doing to hype college football in August, a schedule that more closely resembles the quality of Nevada-Penn State. Here, judge for yourself.
But about twenty of those games will be able to brag–at least for now–about having the presence of a nationally ranked, unbeaten team.
And that alone may be able to explain the ludicrous concept of a pre-season poll. Once the action begins, polls are necessary because at least for now it’s impossible to determine who’s leading the table any other way. Besides, it would be a bit of a buzzkill for a team to wake up mired in 102nd place.
It’s strictly for cosmetics and the ability for multiple licensees to promote what at least on paper purports to be a viable matchup. But as a predictor who eventually winds up the champion–it’s anything but prescient.
SPORTS ILLUSTRATED’s James Parks did a deep dive on his COLLEGE FOOTBALL HQ column last week that proved that point conclusively:
While it’s common for preseason No. 1 teams to make the College Football Playoff, those schools don’t often go on to win the national championship.
How have preseason AP No. 1 ranked teams finished during the College Football Playoff era?
2014: Florida State (finished No. 5)
2015: Ohio State (finished No. 4)
2016: Alabama (finished No. 2)
2017: Alabama (finished No. 1, national champion)
2018: Alabama (finished No. 2)
2019: Clemson (finished No. 2)
2020: Clemson (finished No. 3)
2021: Alabama (finished No. 2)
2022: Alabama (finished No. 5)
2023: Georgia (finished No. 4)
2024: Georgia (finished No. 6)
On the other hand, Parks did allow that there is some degree of halo effect from at least being in the upper echelons:
History suggests anywhere in the top-five is in your best interest. All but one team in the CFP era that won the national title started No. 5 or better in the preseason rankings.
LSU’s historic 2019 team was the outlier, but even then, it wasn’t by much, coming in at No. 6 in the initial poll before going on to run the table as only the third 15-0 team in college football history and the second since the 1890s.
If history is any guide, future national champions need to be ranked in the top five in the preseason poll.
Or if you want to get really specific, taking all the preseason polls into consideration and averaging out the eventual national champions, the best place to debut in the preseason rankings in the playoff era is exactly 3.09 in the top 25.
Which, if you take Parks at face value, means Ohio State is already well on its way not only to an upset (on paper), but a successful defense of its crown.
And, of course, there’s always teams that literally come out of nowhere to muddy the picture. Somewhere out there there is an Indiana that hasn’t shown up in any of these polls in August that by December proved to be a big deal. And who knows what network or platform they’re starting out on?
All the more reason to ignore the promos, one way or the other, and watch for yourself. You don’t need any numbers to justify that.
Courage…