Analytical Preseason College Football Rankings
Updated: Aug 25
The preseason AP poll for the upcoming college football season has officially been released, and everyone is talking about it. When I saw the poll, I thought, "What if I tried to make my own preseason rankings using strictly numbers and nothing else?"
So I did just that.
After a lot of deliberating on what data I should use for a project like this, I decided to come up with a very basic ranking system based on two metrics: the projected quality of each team based on FPI and SP+, as well as how many games each team is projected to win according to ESPN, adjusted for strength of schedule.
This way, the ranking system would capture how good each team is expected to be as well as how well they are expected to perform given the quality of their schedule. Ideally, this system will accurately predict where each team will land in the final version of the AP poll.
I have put my "model's" rankings in a table below, along with some metrics that are useful to look at when evaluating each team heading into the season. Let me explain what each metric included in the table is so you don't get confused.
Team quality is a blend of each team's FPI and SP+. This measures how good each team is projected to be according to ESPN's data.
Adjusted wins is ESPN's projected W/L record adjusted for strength of schedule. This is basically a projected strength-of-record metric. These two metrics are the foundation of the rankings, while the rest of these metrics were not used to create the rankings.
Talent measures how much "talent" each team's roster has based on the high school recruiting ranking of everyone on each website. I got the data for this from puntandrally.com, so shout out to them.
Coaching uses data from cfbcoachrankings.com to evaluate how good each coach is at in-game coaching. This does not consider recruiting ability at all.
QB play measures how well each team's quarterback played in 2025. Quarterback is the most valuable position, so it's useful to get a gauge of how good each team's quarterback played most recently.
Lastly, we have strength of schedule. This is literally just ESPN's strength of schedule metric. Nothing special here.
With that out of the way, here are my analytical preseason rankings for the top 50 teams in college football.
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