The defining word of the 2025 college football season remains: chaos. Five unbeatens, and four teams previously ranked in the AP top 10, went down in Week 8, including Miami biting the dust at home against Louisville and big wins for Alabama (over Tennessee) and Georgia (over Ole Miss). The result? Down is up and up is down — as the latest top 25 rankings can attest.
AP Top 25 college football rankings for Week 9
1. Ohio State
2. Indiana
3. Texas A&M
4. Alabama
5. Georgia
6. Oregon
7. Georgia Tech
8. Ole Miss
9. Miami (FL)
10. Vanderbilt
11. BYU
12. Notre Dame
13. Oklahoma
14. Texas Tech
15. Missouri
16. Virginia
17. Tennessee
18. South Florida
19. Louisville
20. LSU
21. Cincinnati
22. Texas
23. Illinois
24. Arizona State
25. Michigan
Vanderbilt No. 10! Georgia Tech No. 7! Virginia No. 16! South Florida No. 18! Go back a few weeks and try to explain this ranking to the average college football fan and see what happens.
Each week it seems like the deck gets totally reshuffled, with wall-to-wall bangers that leave us scratching our heads and trying to make sense of which teams might actually be good. I don't envy the job of AP voters, this year of all years. But still, it must be said: There are some things to take issue with in the poll heading into what will surely be a similarly bonkers Week 9. Here are four rankings in particular that feel off.
College football teams ranked too high in AP Poll
Texas
The Longhorns held on to their spot in the top 25 pretty comfortably, checking in at No. 22 ... despite getting very lucky to avoid an upset loss at 2-3 Kentucky. Arch Manning was a mess once again, completing less than 50 percent of his passes, while Texas got outgained badly on a per play basis and needed a dramatic stop on fourth down in overtime to escape with a win.
A win is a win, of course, and the Horns are now 5-2. But four of those five have come against Kentucky, San Jose State, Sam Houston and UTEP. Their resume is almost entirely reliant on a win over an Oklahoma team that was welcoming John Mateer back weeks early from thumb surgery. The offense still can't get out of second gear, and while the defense is solid, it's hardly overwhelming. It's hard to figure why this team deserves its ranking right now for any reason other than preseason expectations.
Georgia Tech
I really don't want to throw shade at the Yellow Jackets, who are one of the best stories of the season and just notched a very impressive road win at Duke on Saturday. But I can't help feeling like No. 7 is just a bit rich.
This weekend's win is pretty comfortably the best on Tech's resume right now. Their other wins: on the road against Colorado, Wake Forest (by a single point in overtime) and Duke, and at home against Clemson (hardly as impressive as it seemed at the time), Gardner-Webb, Temple and Virginia Tech. And again, it's not like Georgia Tech is burying these teams; they're 3-0 in one-score games.
None of which is to say that this is a bad team. But I do think it's evidence that the Jackets are a notch below the true title contenders, but have been elevated due mostly to the chaos around them. Then again, if Haynes King can keep putting this offense on his back one grueling run at a time, who knows what's possible?
Virginia
I promise I didn't set out here to start trashing the ACC. And I acknowledge that part of this No. 16 ranking is a product of the sort of head-to-head weirdness you often have to deal with when making ordinal rankings: Virginia owns a road win at Louisville, so if you're going to vault the Cardinals into the top 25 after their upset over Miami, logic would dictate you need to keep the Hoos ahead of them.
But still: I'm not at all convinced this is a top-20 team right now, no matter how impressive Tony Elliott's turnaround has been with Chandler Morris at the helm. That Louisville win was nice, but it was also incredibly fortunate: The Cardinals outgained UVA by around 150 yards and over a full yard per play, only to cough up the game thanks to two brutal turnovers that both went back for touchdowns. The Cavaliers' only other true road game this year? A loss at 4-3 NC State.
The upset of Florida State has lost a ton of shine of late, and the other wins are over Stanford, William & Mary, Coastal Carolina and Washington State, the latter of which required a go-ahead safety in the final minutes. 6-1 is 6-1, and the state of the ACC is such that UVA can probably keep this up through the end of the year, but I have a hard time taking them too seriously beyond that.
College football teams ranked too low in AP Poll
Texas Tech
Texas Tech's dream start finally hit its first speed bump on Saturday in a road upset at the hands of Arizona State. Dropping them all the way down toward the bottom of the one-loss pack, though, feels a bit harsh.
For starters, losing to a Sun Devils team that was welcoming back starting QB Sam Leavitt is hardly an embarrassment, especially considering that Tech was itself playing its own backup in Will Hammond. This feels more like a blip on the radar than anything: The Red Raiders had blasted just about everyone else they'd faced and proved their road bona fides with a convincing win at Utah earlier in the year. This is still a ferocious front seven with a dynamic offense, and they deserve to be on top of the Big 12 pecking order still. Dropping them behind teams like Oklahoma is confusing.