ESPN’s preseason College Football Power Index has Notre Dame sitting in a familiar but still eye-catching spot: near the top of the sport, with a path that looks favorable on paper.
The Irish checked in third in the first FPI release for 2026, earning a rating of 25.9. That put them behind Ohio State at 28.7 and Texas at 26.9, while Oregon landed fourth at 25.3 and Georgia fifth at 24.8.
FPI’s simulations paint Notre Dame as a team built to stack wins. ESPN projects the Irish to finish 10.7-1.3, and the model gives them a 32.7% chance to go undefeated.
That’s the best mark in the country. It also pushes Notre Dame to the second-highest odds of reaching the College Football Playoff at 74.4%, trailing only Ohio State at 75.7%.
The title picture is strong, too. Notre Dame owns the third-best chance to win the national championship at 10.5%, behind Ohio State at 17.1% and Texas at 13.2%. Those three are the only teams in the model with better than a 10% shot at the trophy.
ESPN describes FPI as a “predictive rating system designed to measure team strength and project performance going forward,” built to forecast games and season results. The preseason numbers lean heavily on prior-season data, including returning starters, coaching tenure and past performance. In the model’s framework, each unit - offense, defense and special teams - is measured by how much it would “contribute to the team's net scoring margin on a neutral field” against an average FBS opponent.
At the bottom of that average-opponent scale, West Virginia and Rutgers are the closest teams in the first projections, with ratings of 0.2 and -0.2.
Notre Dame’s placement is helped by a schedule that FPI views as manageable compared with the other top contenders. The Irish’s strength of schedule ranks No. 56 nationally, far easier than the schedules attached to the other teams in the top five.
Texas is No. 3, Ohio State No.
8, Georgia No. 20 and Oregon No. 26.
Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Ole Miss round out the five hardest schedules.
That schedule ranking has already sparked the kind of debate that tends to follow FPI every preseason. The 20 toughest schedules all come from either the SEC or the Big Ten, a setup that critics say can feed back into the model and inflate those leagues’ ratings.
Pete Sampson summed up that line of criticism bluntly on social media: “And so it begins. The SEC is the best league because SEC teams play other SEC teams that are in the SEC, which is the best conference.
No counter arguments will be allowed.”
CBS Sports’ Bud Elliott also flagged ESPN’s preseason numbers from 2025, noting that FPI had nine of the top 13 teams from the SEC and that those teams finished, on average, 10 spots lower.
“Because ESPN's SOS is calculated off its preseason FPI.
As a reminder, ESPN had NINE of the top 13 preseason last year coming from the SEC. Nine!
Those 9 teams were, by ESPN's own year-end FPI, preseason overrated by an AVERAGE of almost 10 spots each.”
Parker Fleming of Dropback HQ made a similar point, saying FPI tends to run higher on Big Ten, ACC and SEC teams while rating teams such as Utah, BYU and Houston lower than betting markets do, and Auburn, Nebraska and Vanderbilt higher.
He also posted a conference-depth projection showing the SEC and Big Ten as the deepest leagues, with the ACC and Big 12 close behind. Among Group of Five conferences, the PAC-12 and American Conference came out highest overall.
For Notre Dame, the numbers bring both optimism and a familiar source of scrutiny. The Irish have marquee games against Miami and BYU, both top-20 teams in FPI, and SMU enters at No.
- But the rest of the slate is lighter, and that’s exactly why the Irish sit so high in the model’s playoff and title projections.
The schedule may not quiet the conversation around Notre Dame. If anything, it sets up another season where the only way to end the debate is to keep winning.
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