College football rankings 2023: 5 teams in Top 25 who will be the first to lose

College football rankings: North Carolina will be the 1st ranked team to lose in 2023

North Carolina has one of the nation’s best quarterbacks, arguably the only passer who comes close to sitting in Tier 1 with USC’s Caleb Williams, the reigning Heisman Trophy winner. So of course they deserve to be ranked to being the season. The AP set them at No. 21 in the preseason poll.

Unfortunately for the Tar Heels, that just set them up to be the first ranked team to lose in 2023.

The Dukes Mayo Classic on Sept. 2 will pit North Carolina against South Carolina in a rivalry game that has been played far too sparingly this century. The two teams have met five times since 1992 and the Gamecocks have won four of those meetings.

This year’s matchup looks pretty evenly matched. SP+ ranks the Tar Heels 28th and the Gamecocks 33rd. SCar was just on the fringes of making the AP Top 25 themselves.

The return of Spencer Rattler makes picking the Gamecocks easier. While Maye and the Tar Heels were stumbling at the end of the 2022 season, Rattler led upsets of Tennessee and Clemson.

The confidence pick isn’t particularly high here, but there’s something about what Beamer is building that’s just outshining Mack Brown and company going into this matchup.