Voters are heroes and villains, clowns and geniuses — and everything in between.
Fans flock to CollegePollTracker.com to analyze ballots. They want to know who ranked their team the highest or the lowest or who didn’t rank their team at all.
There are only 64 voters. Fans can tag every one of them on social media if they want to complain. Sometimes they do.
You’re going to upset fans every week no matter how you vote. On the other hand, if you take a chance on a team and are the only voter who has it on your ballot, you’ll see a lot of love in your mentions on social media.
The AP released the 2025 preseason poll Monday. I was one of 25 voters to rank Texas No. 1. It narrowly nabbed the top spot over No. 2 Penn State, which received 23 first-place votes.
I picked Texas No. 1 because it has great potential at quarterback in Arch Manning and might have the most talent in the country on its roster, according to Phil Steele, whose preseason magazine is a great resource for voters.
No. 3 Ohio State, No. 4 Clemson, No. 5 Georgia and No. 7 Oregon also received first-place votes.
I think the winner of the Week 1 game between Texas and Ohio State will top the poll in Week 2. I mostly base my ballot on resumes, so a team like Penn State, which opens the season with games against Nevada, Florida International and Villanova, will have a hard time moving up in the opening weeks of the season.
Last year, I put Ohio State in the top spot in the preseason poll. That was the first time I picked the correct national champion.
I voted Clemson No. 1 in the preseason poll in 2020 when Alabama won the College Football Playoff. I had Alabama No. 1 in 2021, and Georgia won the title that season. In 2022, I again picked Alabama, and Georgia repeated as national champion. In 2023, I ranked Georgia first in the preseason poll, and Michigan won the championship.
There have been 11 College Football Playoff national championships won by six programs: Alabama (3); Ohio State (2); Clemson (2); Georgia (2); LSU (1); and Michigan (1). All those teams rank in the top 15 in the preseason.
There has been a debate about the usefulness of preseason polls, which some coaches feel unfairly impact the rankings for the rest of the season. The Big Ten hasn’t released an official preseason poll in years. The Big 12 did away with its poll this year.
“I think there’s no value,” Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark said in July. “And I also feel that with the transfer portal and with roster management ... as you build that roster, no one knows what they really have. They know what they have on paper, but it hasn’t played out.”
Mike DeCourcy, of the Sporting News, tackled the issue in a column this week, writing a story under the headline, “Abolish the AP preseason poll? It is an absurd concept that a team’s final CFP rankings are affected.”
DeCourcy talked to Ralph Russo, a longtime AP sports writer now with The Athletic. Russo ran the poll for many years. He saved me a few times by correcting mistakes in my polls. For the first time this year, now that he’s no longer with the AP, he’s voting in the poll.
One of the important things about the poll, Russo said, is the historical element. I’ve brought up the same thing anytime someone asks why the AP poll exists in the era of the College Football Playoff rankings.
The poll started in 1936. Schools boast of how many weeks they have spent at No. 1: 141 for Alabama; and 106 for Ohio State. College football historians keep track of how many times the No. 1 team has played the No. 2 team.
There are so many reasons to keep the AP poll — even the preseason poll — going in an age when the playoff ranking dominates the conversation late in the season.
“Like 90 percent of sports conversation is about who is better and predicting the future. That is the essence of sports,” Russo told DeCourcy. “People who love professional sports, before every major professional sports league, somebody’s going to put out a power ranking, they’re going to predict the division winners, they’re going to predict the Super Bowl winner, they’re going to predict the World Series winner. This is how we do sports.”
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