Ohio State is the AP preseason No. 1, but this poll is hardly a one-team story.
When voters released the 2026 AP top 25, the Buckeyes landed on top with 40 first-place votes, yet five different teams picked up No. 1 support. Oregon checked in at No. 2 with 14 first-place votes, Georgia was third, Notre Dame followed at No. 4 with six first-place votes, and Texas rounded out the top five.
Indiana came in at No. 6 and also drew eight first-place votes, while Miami sat seventh with one. The rest of the rankings: Texas A&M, Ole Miss, Oklahoma, LSU, Texas Tech, Alabama, BYU, USC, Michigan, Washington, Penn State, SMU, Tennessee, Utah, Iowa, Houston, Louisville, and Missouri.
The Big Ten and SEC again sit at the center of the preseason picture, even if the voting didn’t break evenly at the very top. The SEC placed nine teams in the AP top 25, the most of any conference and 36 percent of the poll.
The Big Ten followed with eight. Notably, no SEC team received a first-place vote.
Indiana’s spot at No. 6 stands out for another reason: pollsters were clearly paying attention after overlooking them before. The Hoosiers collected eight first-place votes, a sign they are not being dismissed this time around. Georgia was the last team to win back-to-back titles, doing it in 2021 and 2022.
Preseason rankings always come with a built-in warning label, and the recent record backs that up. Just two teams this century have started No. 1 in the preseason AP poll and finished as national champions: USC in 2004 and Alabama in 2017.
In the College Football Playoff era, Alabama’s 2017 run is still the only wire-to-wire title from preseason No. 1.
The broader history says that starting near the top matters more than being crowned No. 1 in August. Almost every national champion in the playoff era has opened at No. 5 or better in the AP preseason poll. The exceptions were LSU in 2019, which started at No. 6, and Indiana, which began at No. 20 before storming to the school’s first national championship and finishing as the first 16-0 team in college football since Yale in 1894.
That’s part of why the early poll remains such a tricky forecast. Last year, James Madison and Tulane both made the College Football Playoff without appearing in the preseason AP rankings at all, and four unranked teams had done it two years earlier. For 2026, Navy, Boise State, and UNLV are among the Group of Six hopefuls trying to crash the bracket.
At the same time, the AP top 25 has a long memory for how often the preseason picture falls apart. A sizable chunk of last year’s ranked teams never finished in the poll, including Penn State, Clemson, LSU, Arizona State, Illinois, South Carolina, Florida, SMU, Kansas State, Iowa State, Tennessee, and Boise State.
Ohio State’s place at the top also adds to a remarkable AP résumé. The Buckeyes now have 73 No. 1 preseason appearances, the most in history, and have been the top pick in more than 95 percent of preseason polls since their first No. 1 debut in 1950. They also hold the all-time lead with 1,016 regular-season poll appearances.
If there’s a lesson buried in the 2026 preseason AP top 25, it’s that the path to the title rarely starts with certainty. No. 1 grabs the headlines.
No. 2, No. 3, and even No. 5 have been the better launch pads.
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