Clemson. Florida. South Carolina. Unfortunately, that list goes even longer if I took the time to dive deeper into it, but this is a list of the fraudulent teams that come to mind who’ve conned AP voters into ranking them favorably in the preseason poll this year. If you go back to last year, Florida State was the biggest fraud of them all, ranking No. 10 in the preseason and finishing the 2024 season with two wins.
It begs the question, should there even be preseason rankings? AP voters are blindly ranking teams based on potential and how they look on paper. Yet in just this season alone, several teams proved they didn’t even deserve a ranking inside the top 25 let alone the top five, like Clemson.
At some point, we have to think about the purpose the rankings serve. Before a game is even kicked off, preseason rankings are something for college football fans to argue and debate about as excitement for the season ramps up. That said, there’s no real credibility to them and they should be treated as such.
For teams like South Florida, they get ranked inside the top 25 for one week, just to get booted out after winning a game they were supposed to lose anyway. Teams like Boise State get ranked and not a single person that knows football had faith they’d be the Group of 5 representative for a second straight year in the College Football Playoff.
There’s no easy solution, but abolishing the preseason poll has to be in serious consideration. Especially when you think about how flawed the process is to begin with, as some preseason voters don’t really appear to take the process seriously.
History proves preseason polls really aren’t that credible
Preseason rankings really don’t tell us much other than there’s a select few teams that are going to be good and the rest, we have no idea about. According to Brett McMurphy of On3, in the College Football Playoff era, on average, about 11 teams per season started the year ranked and finished unranked. In 29 of the last 31 years, at least one team went from unranked to ranked in the top 10. Every year in the last 22 years, at least one team that was ranked inside the top 10 finished the year unranked.
Last year, it was Michigan and Florida State who saw their seasons plummet. This year, it’s Clemson who’s on the verge of implosion and Notre Dame, who ranked No. 24 this week, despite being 0-2 ahead of Week 4. If we stretch it to the top 13 preseason ranked teams, Arizona State and South Carolina have also been booted out of the AP top 25 poll.
This much parity doesn’t make sense; this isn’t what makes college football fun, this is what makes me wonder why we put so much value into preseason rankings. I don’t know how it would logistically work, but there has to be a better way to evaluate teams rather than blindly asking reporters around the country to predict what a team will look like without seeing a single game or box score.
Any team ranked inside the top 10 shouldn’t finish unranked in my opinion. If you are one of the 10 best teams to start the year, in college football it most likely means you shouldn’t finish outside the top 25.
The fact that there’s so much movement in the top 10 each year makes it clear that preseason polls are nothing more than pure speculation. It’s a way to drive excitement ahead of the season. I’m all for that, but if that’s the case, it should have any official credibility until we actually see what teams look like.
Clemson is proof that preseason rankings are nothing more than official overreactions
Nobody would have anticipated this many preseason teams getting booted out of the top 25 rankings a month into the season. What if the first rankings didn’t come out until after Week 1 of the college football season? Then we’d actually have justified rankings. And sure, a lot of those Week 1 games don’t really give a good barometer, but it does at least make sense as the “eye test” comes into play.
Would Clemson have still been ranked inside the top 15 after scoring just 10 points against LSU and losing its home opener? Probably not. They didn’t look like a top 15 team then and they don’t now. Look at Florida for example too. They weren’t ranked at all last season and all of a sudden were considered a top 15 team?
After Florida’s loss to South Florida in Week 2, it would have been clear they aren’t one of the best teams this season and it wouldn’t have given South Florida false hope they could possibly get into the College Football Playoff.
Then there are teams like Memphis that finished the season ranked inside the top 25 last year and were unranked through the first four games. Memphis beat Arkansas on Saturday to improve to 4-0 and now have the best odds to get into the CFP as a Group of 5 representative.
It’s something that has to be seriously considered moving forward because while upsets are fun and exciting, all it does is makes us realize certain teams weren’t good from the beginning and others were better than we thought.