College football’s preseason pecking order is a mess, and nobody’s pretending otherwise. In the transfer portal era, July comes with plenty of noise and not much certainty, which is exactly why people keep reaching for any edge they can find.
This year, one of the more intriguing clues is age.
Indiana’s stunning run to a 16-0 season still hangs over the sport like a warning label for anyone trying to make sense of preseason rankings. The Hoosiers were slotted No. 20 in the preseason AP poll before they ripped through the year and turned into something nobody saw coming. Their roster, packed with former mid-major pieces who clicked into place, became the kind of outlier that sends everyone back to the drawing board.
One thing that stood out from talking to those Indiana players before the Rose Bowl was how old they were in college football terms. Curt Cignetti wasn’t building around a roster full of teenagers. The group was seasoned, and it played that way.
That’s why the search now is for another team built with older bodies and older minds, the kind that can overwhelm younger rosters. A dataset from RotoWire is helping make that case, and by that measure Oklahoma State jumps out immediately.
The Cowboys, now led by new head coach Eric Morris, have the oldest Power 4 roster in the country, according to RotoWire. They also brought in 55 transfers, according to 247Sports, and 50 of those were rated as 3-star transfer prospects. That’s a lot of turnover, and it has a familiar feel.
It also comes after back-to-back rough seasons for the program: 3-9 and then 1-11 in the final two years of the Mike Gundy era. Morris, who turned 40 last October, would become a legend if he could turn this group back into a contender within two years.
Then again, if that happens, you heard it here first.
The age data also raises a bigger question: if roster experience is such a useful clue, what do we do with the fact that some of the sport’s most highly regarded teams are among its youngest?
Georgia, one of the national favorites, is listed by RotoWire as the youngest roster in the nation at 19.81 years per player. The methodology is not exact, and RotoWire explains that at the bottom of its chart: “Data: On3, ESPN, CBS Sports, Yahoo Sports & official team rosters. Age modeled by eligibility class on a redshirt-aware scale (real ages used where published),”
Alabama sits at 117th-oldest among the 138 FBS teams, with an average age of 20.04 years. That puts the Tide 12th among the 16 SEC schools. Auburn is 87th nationally and 7th in the SEC at 20.22 years.
There’s also a wrinkle in how those two rosters are listed. Auburn’s official website player bios include birthdays without the year, while Alabama’s rosters don’t list birthdates or ages at all.
Alabama’s roster breakdown shows 19 freshmen, 26 sophomores, 47 juniors, 24 seniors and eight fifth-year players. Auburn’s roster lists 22 freshmen, 47 sophomores, 19 juniors and 26 seniors, without separately identifying fifth-year players.
So yes, the sport is still a puzzle. And in a year when everyone is trying to figure out who’s real and who’s just dressed up for August, people are willing to study just about anything to get a read on it.
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