When will the preseason AP Top 25 college football rankings come out?

Can you smell the hedges in Athens yet? Has the intro to "Enter Sandman" started penetrating your ears in Blacksburg? Are there any overzealous Alabama fans ready to fire Kalen DeBoer already? Maybe we aren't there quite yet but we are on the precipice of the 2024 college football season getting underway and, as such, we're all full of anticipation over when the preseason AP Top 25 rankings are going to be released.

Some college football fans will certainly argue that the preseason rankings don't mean all that much. And that is true. We see every season a multitude of teams outperform preseason expectations and, similarly, those who underperform in relation to those expectations. However, we still love to pine over the AP Top 25. It gives fans something to gauge their favorite teams with coming into the season and, moreover, let's us all know where some teams will either have to climb from or hold their position at to see the College Football Playoff.

That's much more interesting in the 2024 season, of course, with the College Football Playoff expanding to 12 teams this year. That gives more teams the opportunity to have a chance at a national championship and should create more year-round intrigue. And that will obviously start with the AP Top 25.

But when will the preeminent preseason college football rankings be released? Here's what you need to know.

When will the college football preseason AP Top 25 be released?

While we don't have an official date for the poll's release, all signs point to the preseason AP Top 25 being released on Monday, Aug. 12 for the 2024 season. The initial rankings for the college football season have historically been released in mid-August. Specifically, we've seen over the past couple of years that it is released on the Monday that is roughly two weeks before the Week 0 slate to kick off the CFB season. For this year, that would give us the Aug. 12 date.

How accurate is the preseason AP Top 25? A look at 2023's poll

It's always interesting to take a look at how well the AP Top 25 college football rankings actually showed us what to expect in a given season. So let's look at last year's Top 25 going into the 2023 campaign to see where the big hits and misses were. First, the rankings:

1. Georgia Bulldogs
2. Michigan Wolverines
3. Ohio State Buckeyes
4. Alabama Crimson Tide
5. LSU Tigers
6. USC Trojans
7. Penn State Nittany Lions
8. Florida State Seminoles
9. Clemson Tigers
10. Washington Huskies
11. Texas Longhorns
12. Tennessee Volunteers
13. Notre Dame Fighting Irish
14. Utah Utes
15. Oregon Ducks
16. Kansas State Wildcats
17. TCU Horned Frogs
18. Oregon State Beavers
19. Wisconsin Badgers
20. Oklahoma Sooners
21. North Carolina Tar Heels
22. Ole Miss Rebels
23. Texas A&M Aggies
24. Tulane Green Wave
25. Iowa Hawkeyes

You have to say that the AP voters were in the right ballpark of the preseason AP Top 25 a year ago. Even though Georgia was preseason No. 1 and failed to make the College Football Playoff, many believed they were still the biggest challenger to Michigan. As for the Wolverines, the preseason No. 2-ranked team, they obviously went on to complete the perfect season with a national championship. It's also worth noting that Alabama was a preseason Top 4 team that made the playoff.

Ohio State at No. 3 isn't an egregious error as the Buckeyes also flirted with a spot in the CFP but came up just short -- incidentally, a loss to Michigan likely costing them their spot, and the AP Top 25 had them behind the Wolverines in the preseason rankings. And while teams like Texas, Washington and Florida State were all heavily in the Playoff mix, all three teams were ranked inside the Top 11 of the preseason poll, which is a solid forecast from the voters.

Then we have some of the bigger misses. None were bigger than USC with the Trojans sitting at No. 6 in the preseason poll and then flirting -- though ultimately not -- with missing a bowl game. Right ahead of them in the preseason rankings were the LSU Tigers and, though they did have a Heisman winner in Jayden Daniels, they were also nowhere near a Top 5 team thanks to a paltry defense.

All this is to say, preseason college football rankings are an inexact science and the preseason AP Top 25 is comprised of writers with opinions going into a given season. Some prognostication is going to be spot-on, other instances are not. In the aggregate, though, it still serves as a great temperature check for most teams entering the year.