It’s another season of college football which means that we at LWOS have another year of Top 25s coming at you. This year we have a team of 17 writers ranking the teams each week and bringing you a comprehensive Top 25 ranking. How do our rankings compare to the more common outlets like the AP and Coaches’ Polls? There will always be slight differences because everyone has their own perspective, but usually most college football outlets agree on the general outlook. The AP hasn’t released their poll yet, but we only have a few major differences than the coaches. We are much higher on Arizona State but are very skeptical about Florida State. Like the Coaches’ Poll, we have Ohio State as a near-unanimous #1.
The SEC leads the way with eight teams in our poll (and two SEC teams were the next two out), but before you accuse us of SEC bias read the explanation why below the rankings.
LWOS College Football Preseason Top 25
Just missed out: Missouri, Tennessee, Utah, Louisville
With eight teams in our Top 25 and 10 in the Top 27, we clearly see that the SEC is ahead of the pack. Or do we?
The top of the rankings are pretty even. Both the Big Ten and Big XII have two Top 5 teams to start the season. In fact, the Top 8 has four conferences with two teams each. The only power conference missing from our Top 8 is the ACC. We’re not so down on them, though, with three teams from the ACC checking into the Top 15.
To the SEC question. In general, our voters ranked the Pac 12 along with the SEC. Each conference has four teams in the Top 16. Each has five in the Top 20. The SEC is stacked along the tail end of the rankings. In short, our voters felt that whoever is about #6-7 in the SEC deserves to be ranked. Our voters just couldn’t agree on who those teams would be. An SEC team took at least two of the last five spots on almost every single ballot. With different SEC teams collecting different votes from everyone, six SEC teams slid into the rankings between the #20 and #30 spots. As the season goes on and separation occurs within the SEC, we will see the teams towards the back of the rankings become definitive and those that fall behind in the SEC will fall out of our rankings. So again, the fact that we have the whole SEC West ranked in the preseason doesn’t mean we think they will all stay there all season. We just have a group of voters with different ideas as to which of those teams will come out ahead in that division (similarly, we have five of the six Pac 12 South teams in the top 30). As the season goes on and teams pick up losses, they will fall out of the rankings. It would be shocking to see more than four teams from any division ranked at the end of this year, even if that many are ranked at the beginning.
Our only teams not from a power conference in the rankings were Notre Dame (#14) and Boise State (#21), as the Broncos try and repeat their status as the top Group of 5 team.
