Miami is back on top of The Associated Press Top 25 for the first time since 2002, and the carnage around college football’s elite shook up the poll in a way that hadn’t happened before.
Five of the top seven teams lost this past week, a first in the AP poll’s 90-year history, and the chaos pushed Miami, BYU and Ohio State into a tightly packed top three. Georgia, which had been No. 1 for just one week, fell after losing at home to Auburn, while Notre Dame and Georgia still managed to hold top-five spots despite close losses.
Miami claimed the No. 1 spot after surviving Florida State in double overtime to stay unbeaten. The Hurricanes moved up two places and received 40 of the 70 first-place votes from the media panel, finishing just 22 points ahead of No.
2 BYU. It’s Miami’s first time at No. 1 since the 2002 season ended in the national championship game against Ohio State.
BYU’s rise is just as striking. The Cougars beat Notre Dame 28-24 at home as a 10.5-point underdog and moved to 6-0 for a third straight season.
Their No. 2 ranking is their highest since their 1984 national championship season, and it’s the first time they’ve been this high since 1996. BYU earned 20 first-place votes, with Ohio State collecting nine and sitting 26 points behind the Cougars.
The Buckeyes are No. 3, well ahead of Notre Dame at No. 4 and Georgia at No. 5. Georgia’s drop came after it became the second No. 1 team in two weeks to lose to an unranked opponent; Texas had done the same the week before.
This week also delivered a complete turnover in the Top 25. Every team in the rankings is new compared with last week, though only two teams dropped out.
The top 10 stayed relatively steady because Notre Dame, Georgia and No. 6 Indiana had already built up some cushion with their 6-0 starts, and both of those losses came against top-10 opponents.
Indiana’s home loss to Ohio State was enough to keep the Hoosiers in the top six, followed by Mississippi, Texas Tech, UCLA and Utah. Texas Tech picked up the final first-place vote.
The other big fall came for Alabama, which dropped seven spots to No. 13 after losing at Tennessee. Texas slid even further, tumbling 12 spots to No. 19 after its home loss to Florida.
Two teams entered the poll and two fell out. No.
20 Florida is back after dropping out last week following back-to-back lopsided losses, and No. 25 Arizona makes its season debut after an open date and four straight double-digit wins since losing to BYU.
Out went Oklahoma State after losing at Houston, ending a three-week stay, and Mississippi State after a 31-0 loss at LSU that followed a 23-point home defeat to Alabama.
Miami’s climb also put the ACC back at the top of the poll for the first time since Clemson in 2020. Before that, no ACC team besides Florida State in 2014 had been No. 1 since Clemson’s run.
A few more notes from the reshuffled rankings: the last time the SEC’s highest-ranked team was behind teams from every other power conference was Dec. 3, 2023, when Alabama sat at No. 5 behind teams from the Big Ten, Pac-12, Big 12 and ACC. The last regular season week in which No. 1 and No. 2 both lost was 2017, when Alabama lost to Auburn and Miami fell to Pittsburgh on Thanksgiving weekend. And the last time unranked teams beat No. 1 in consecutive weeks was 1990, with Miami set to host unranked Pittsburgh on Saturday.
No. 9 UCLA has matched its highest ranking since 2022, and No. 14 Houston is at its best spot since being No. 11 at midseason in 2016.
The conference breakdown shows the SEC with nine ranked teams, followed by the Big Ten with six, the Big 12 with five, the ACC with three, the Pac-12 with one and one independent in Notre Dame.
There are also a pair of ranked matchups on deck. No.
7 Mississippi visits No. 19 Texas, with the Rebels riding momentum after outscoring Vanderbilt and Missouri by a combined 83-20 following that 24-point loss to Florida.
Texas, meanwhile, is sliding and might have a new quarterback this week.
No. 14 Houston heads to No.
10 Utah, where the Cougars will try to beat a ranked opponent for the second time in the last three seasons. Utah enters unbeaten after escaping Colorado as a 15.5-point favorite.
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Miamis win over Florida State had all the ingredients of a classic rivalry game, from the points to the tension to the kind of late drama that gets replayed for years. The Hurricanes came away with a 43-35 victory, but the closing minutes became the main talking point after a holding penalty on Florida States Xavier Chaplin wiped out what would have been a game-tying touchdown catch by Micahi Danzy.
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