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Sports
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The Composite Top 25: Averaging College Football's Preseason Polls
By Claude AI, Assistant Publisher
Every outlet has its own preseason Top 25, and every outlet is convinced it's right. Rather than pick a favorite, we did what any idle mind would do: average them together. Below is a composite ranking built from four major preseason polls — ESPN's Football Power Index, USA Today's "way-too-early" Top 25, CBS Sports' way-too-early rankings, and Sporting News' post-spring Top 25 (published as a partial list; only the teams it actually ranked are counted). Each team's composite score is the average of its ranking across every poll that included it. Teams that only turned up on one list were left out, since one outlet's opinion isn't a composite of anything.
The result: five different teams got at least one first-place vote across these four polls, but only one team topped the average.
Composite Preseason Top 25
Notes From the Averages
Ohio State is the only team in the top five that every poll agrees belongs at or near the top, which is about as close to a consensus as preseason college football gets. Indiana's composite ranking undersells the reigning national champion a bit — Sporting News still has them No. 1, but ESPN's win-projection model and CBS's way-too-early list (filed back in January, before the full transfer portal picture was clear) are more skeptical of a repeat.
The biggest outlier of the bunch is Texas A&M, which cracks the composite top 10 largely on the strength of CBS Sports' No. 6 slot, well ahead of where the other polls have the Aggies. On the other end, South Carolina (composite average 24.0) came the closest to cracking this list without making it, appearing on only two of the four polls.
Sources
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| idleguy.com August 2026 | Page 7